Decisions regarding implementation
The results are in! We finally have found out about how much benzene there is in the school’s drinking water. There is approximately .25-.5 ppm (parts per million) in the water from the test we did. This means that in ppb (parts per billion) there is approximately 2.5 or 5, the limit. At the end of last week, Sam created a thingiverse account. We hope we can use this to spread awareness about benzene and make it possible for people to recreate our filter. On Monday, Jackson and Sam made another filter to test the levels of benzene after the water goes through. On Tuesday, our 3rd prototype was finally finished. When we got it, we were a little surprised about the outcome. It was much smaller than we had suspected it would be, and part of it was very flimsy and broke off. From this, we went straight back to Tinkercad and changed the dimensions. We also did a couple of changes to the design, so that the top part would not break off. Our next, hopefully last, design should be printed by Wednesday morning. After, we looked closer to our results from the test, and we realized that the level of benzene in the tube was practically the same as the level from a tube that hadn’t been used. At first, we all looked at each other wondering what happened. From there, we hypothesized that the gas collected from the previous week probably evaporated. Unfortunately, we don’t know for sure, so we came up with a new idea. Phoebe offered to bring in laundry detergent, so we can put it in the water, and test the benzene levels. (Many laundry detergents, such as tide, contain a form of benzene called alkylbenzene sulfonate.) Hopefully on Wednesday, we can test two samples: one with laundry detergent, and one with laundry detergent that went through our filter.
On Tuesday, we also went to meet with Joan, an advisor around school who wrote a book about kids who use 3D printers at school. So far, we have three prototypes of our filter. We showed them to her, and after we explained our goal of it filtering out benzene, she understood what we had done. She gave us advice about how we could improve our models, and she also took a picture with our group and our models to bring to a conference in June for her book. We are very excited about this because it will spread awareness about our idea, and it will be a part of sustainability for our filters.
On Tuesday, we also went to meet with Joan, an advisor around school who wrote a book about kids who use 3D printers at school. So far, we have three prototypes of our filter. We showed them to her, and after we explained our goal of it filtering out benzene, she understood what we had done. She gave us advice about how we could improve our models, and she also took a picture with our group and our models to bring to a conference in June for her book. We are very excited about this because it will spread awareness about our idea, and it will be a part of sustainability for our filters.