With water security an increasing threat, it is imperative that CEE students become well versed in the fundamentals of water treatment.
On CEE's Environmental Team, students gain hands-on experience working with real world challenges such as clogging, cost, sustainability, and efficiency.
Heading into competition season, the Environmental Team, a.k.a.Team TropiCAL, due to the presence of Hawaiian Punch in their wastewater, has been hard at work designing a filtration
system—made up solely of household materials—that can treat a wastewater of soil, oil, fruit juice (the Hawaiian Punch), vinegar, starch, yeast, and salt.
Their filtration system closely mimics the wastewater treatment process of coagulation, flocculation, sedimentation, and filtration—to achieve the highest quality effluent.
TropiCAL is on its second prototype as its first design kept clogging.
Karina Yap and the 1st prototype; L-R: Carl Bello, James Roman III, Kyle Miller, and Dylan Kato with the 2nd prototype
TropiCAL demonstrates ingenuity with its system components—and with its lab tools.
Environmental Lab staff manager Negassi Hadgu once asked the team to hand him a stirring stick for the wastewater.
Hadgu was given a baseball bat. (There are a lot of handy things down in the lab.)
This prompted Hadgu's reminder that "being engineers, they might be able to come up with a better stirrring stick..."
The team also raised the suspicions of a Safeway cashier when they bought "an inordinate amount" of corn starch (a wastewater constituent). "Corn bread," explained a team member.
See how the water changes as it undergoes treatment in the team's filter:
L-R: wastewater (1-2), wastewater with coagulants (3), wastewater with coagulants after settling (4), after lava rocks (5), after gravel (6), and after sand (7)
Having just submitted its technical report, TropiCAL is preparing for the actual competition in April. At Mid-Pac, they will present on the filter, build it under timed conditions, and then have their treated water judged on pH, dissolved oxygen content, electrical conductivity, turbidity, and chlorine residual.
"We took second place at Mid-Pac last year, but we aim to take first this year," said John Law, Environmental Team Project Manager.
Go TropiCAL!
Go Bears!