Group Members

Aidan, Amanda, Brendan, Byron, Cade, and Ronan

Chemical Engineering

Chemical engineering is the branch of engineering that deals with chemical production and the manufacturing of products through chemical processes. This includes designing equipment, systems and processes for refining raw materials and for mixing, compounding and processing chemicals to make valuable products. We used chemical engineering when creating ideas for our water treatment system. We had to think about which chemical processes could be used to clean storm drain water.

 Research

The first step we took during this project was research. We researched different types of water treatment systems and filtration systems. We used this research to later formulate our ideas of a water treatment that would be both functional and effective at cleaning storm drain water and putting it to use as greywater inside of toilet bowls and sprinklers.

System Design

 Our water filtration system has three main tasks:

• Input greywater from a community of homes and storm drain runoff
• Filter pollutants and test water underground
• Pump water into toilets and sprinkler systems

 The filtration system first filters out solids with metal grates. Then, the water is passed to a UV filter that kills harmful bacteria and viruses. This module is especially important becasue it would be easy to spred disease to a whole community with contaminated water. Next, the water is taken to an activated carbon filter that filters out industrial pollutants, organic matter, and pesticides.

After filtration, the water is taken to a series of 55 gallon holding tanks where they are stored for a maximum of 24 hrs (greywater is only usable for that time). The water is tested for a number of  factors: pH level, fecal contamination, and turbidity. If it's safe to use, then the water is pumped from the tanks up to toilets and sprinkler systems.