Devices To Eliminate Solids And Suspended Materials Out Of Contaminated Water

The purpose of this lab was to create a device with the materials provided for us to remove solids and suspended materials out of the contaminated water. By creating this device we will be able to simulate the first stage of wastewater removal additionally, depending on how we build our device it will determine the turbidity of the contaminated water. With that we believed that our device will be able to remove most of the suspended materials, the gravel will filter out the bigger particles, the filter paper will filter out the smaller materials and the cloth will remove the remaining sediments. Although our device will remove most of the solids we predicted that there will some particles that will still be in the treated water. The

We were able to filter a significant amount of particles that was in the contaminated water, the turbidity of the water went from 374 NTU to 44 NTU. Therefore this concludes that the prediction we made was true, while the gravel removed the largest particles and the filter paper and cloth caught the smaller particles. Each of the layers that the contaminated water went through more and more of the contaminants were filtered out. If we added more layers to our device the water would have less contaminants, just like the wastewater process the more the water is treated the more the water will be less

One area that was made was that we forgot to time the rate that the water dripped into the graduated cylinder at the beginning so we started timing the rate a little late. At most we started to time the rate about a minute or two into the process. On the instructions it said that we had to clean our device by running tap water through it until the water becomes clear but we skipped that step and went right into pouring the contaminated water into our device. Skipping the step of cleaning our device most likely changed the results of the turbidity a bit by increasing the chances of more contaminants entering into the filtered water. Additionally, some of the contaminated water did not go through the filter paper because it shifted during the process which resulted in it not catching all of the particles. The water not going through the filter paper could also resulted in more contaminants infiltrating our filtered water. Lastly an error that occurred was that the water started to leak through the cloth, this resulted in losing some of our water. Overall, these small errors may have changed the turbidity of the