2. Team Members
•Team Lead:
Corey Shono
•Subleads:
Jonas Castro, Melissa Nguyen
•Members:
Chris Simons, Nathan Arboleda, Mai Nong, Caroll Le, Eric Kirby, Ian Martin
4. How it works:
2K16
Feed water in
Centrifugal compressor used to
compress vapor back into liquid
Boil water using heat exchanger +
heating element
Heat is recycled using heat
exchanger
7. Controls Subteam
Use Aspen to simulate
compression optimal conditions
Gathered temperature data to
correlate heat applied vs.
temperature
Goal: Create a PID control system
to regulate temperature
10. What We Learned
Current Prototype does not meet
desired yield
Prototype: Does not insulate
properly, mister falls off, and
current materials cannot
withstand heat, vapor does not
condense
11. Path Forward
3-D print a model which incorporates
all components, even a
compressor, and hopefully obtain a
higher yield.
Hydrophobic spray to prevent
seawater from damaging our
system
Nathan
Mechanical VCD can be quantified by very complicated Heat transfer eqns i.e. via conservation of energy, q = mC_p*T, and UAlogT.
Complicated, but can be explained w/ diagram
Chris
Ian
Caroll
Melissa: Hello everyone, My name is melissa and I’m the material subteam leader. One of the important things to consider for our system is to build a system that lasts, which leads us to work on picking the right material for our project.To understand the advantages of different materials for our system’s needs, we researched and put together a quality function deployment chart. This helps us to compare different materials under different criteria. The 4 potential materials we chose were: stainless steel, aluminum. We rated them on 4 criteria: Corrosivity, cost, maximum operating temperature and pressure, construction feasibility. The higher the total score is, the better the materials are for our system. As we can see here, aluminium and copper come on top of the other two. We are planning on using both copper and aluminium for different parts of the system depending on the requirements of certain parts.
The next problem that we need to consider is the salt buildup on the mister as we are dealing with sea water. It is safe to assume that after a period of time having sea water goes through our mister, there would be salt buildup with can change or stop the flow rate of sea water mists into the system. We did an experiment in which we put our misters in highly concentrated salt solution. The second picture shows the salt buildup on the mister. Then we use vinegar to see how effective it is in cleaning the mister. And the result shows that vinegar can be used to clean up salt buildup as shown in figure 3. The nice thing about using vinegar is that since we are trying to produce drinking water, vinegar is safe for human consumption and is also inexpensive.
