We took a quick break from our flood table, but we are back at it! We wanted to replace the two filters with new hydrophobic material. As you can see, the two new filters are looking brand new. Instead of running the tests with cooking oil, we will now run it with motor oil.
Our team member, Seth, would come in everyday and do trials with our mini filter. Each day, he would put five drops of vegetable oil. Then he'll activate the system and come back the next day. We would check the big red bin the next day, to see if there's any oil inside. We would also check the two mini filters that are attached to the flood table. Above are some photos of the recent trial we did. We are currectly on our 17th trial with 45 drops of oil.
Jen Benson, a river keeper who helps protect and advocate the Hudson River, contacted us! She wanted to know more about our project and how our prototype works. So we and Ms.Benson video chatted. She was amazed by our project. We also got a chance to learn more about the organization she's in. We appreciated her interest towards our project. It was great talking to her!
This is how the filter looks under the table. STORM has made a mini filter more new and improved. When we ran just clear water through our flood table, we noticed that the water only goes through the circumference of the storm drain. So we put hydrophobic material and netting , putting it all together. As seen in the last photo, the two go around the outline of the PVC pipe.
On January 15th, Passaic Sewage Valley visited P.S 28. It was a true pleasure to have them. The company and our project were both very similar. We decided it was best to introduce ourselves to them and make them aware of our project. The other Project Reservoir teams got to introduce their project to them as well.
1/12/16 We are currently testing out our table as we planned. We made a tube system which will keep the water flowing over and over again until someone stops it. We just filled the tank with water and here are the results. As you can see most of the water comes from circumference of the storm drain.
12/5/15 We have recently finished our fourth day trial. We compared each trial and we saw a slight difference. We are trying to find a way to test the water to see how much soap they still have in them.
We are currently now running test using soap. Many people wash cars outside of their homes and this soap goes into one of our waterways and kills many underwater creatures.
As you can see, our filter did not work towards thick paint. As researched, the smell of the paint pollutes the water,the color doesn't. When we smelled the filtered water, it did not smell like paint. The filter helped take away the scent of the paint. For the oil trial,it worked! The oil added to the water before we ran test is the first cup. It's very hard too see but the water was very oily. Day 1 trial is the second cup. The cup had less oil in the water when it ran through our filter. Day 2 was basically the same as Day 1. But there was less oil. When we came to look at Day 4, the water was completely filtered. We
The creation of our mini-bucket filter. It runs tests very well,and we recored a 24 hour time lapse(with the assistance of our mentor, Mr. Naatus) to see how it filters vegetable oil(oil was dyed with blue food coloring)!!
S.T.O.R.M has taught students from different schools and tried our " Build-A-Filter experiment. You wouldn't believe what they came up with!
Working on an outline of a real sized storm drain
S.T.O.R.M is creating a filter system that we can place under a sewer plate. This filter system will have three layers. The first layer will have a net to catch any trash that was in the water. Next would be an absorbent sock that will only absorb oil that comes from the water. The last layer would be rocks to catch out any trash that was left in the water. The water should come out clean. We are going to test this out in our table back at school. This is us measuring a storm drain for our scale model.
We attended the Wild Jazz Event at the local reservoir. We talked about our project and informed others about water pollution and rainwater runoff.
The student below had different had different trials to try and purify the water. Each trial he did, he used a different filter.