We began our project with doing some background information on chlorination and with the help of the group from last semester, we learned that a similar project had been done in Hondurus. To keep everything simple, we based our design off of a chlorinator that an MIT graduate, named Amy Smith, had constructed; hoping to make minor modifications. After a couple weeks of trying to get in contact with her, we later found out that her chlorinator was insufficient. Only because her chlorinator design was one with constant drip and in order to properly chlorinator water, the chlorine must be varied based on the water intake coming into the chlorination system. Because of these findings, we were forced to take a different approach to solving the problem.
The next step was to get in contact with Dave Frodsham who was a Penn State Alumni that was working down in Panama for the Peace Corps. He was able to give us a concise breakdown of the problem at hand since he was directly working on the system. He also informed us of how the current chlorination system worked as well as what he was doing to improve it; as assumed it was a constant drip chlorinator. However, before we began constructing our own chlorinator, we learned that they already had an advanced chlorinator in place called the Dosatron, something Dave forgot to mention. We later learned he left out this information because the Dosatron had filtration problems.. So with the help of our professor, Dr. Schuhmann, we came up with the idea of installing baffles in the sedimentation tank to comat the filtration problem. Only to hear from Dave that the Dosatron had actually exploded when it clogged the first time; the hi-tech machine was not sustainable in such a low-tech environment. After these findings we were back where we started and the semester was coming to its end We decided it would be best if we talked to Dave on the phone so we could learn what the actual problem was.
Unforunately we were able to get the specifics of the problem at the end of the semester and were not able to construct anything to send to Panama. But on the bright side, all the information we were able to obtain will be of great service to the group that takes on this project next semester.
