For the past couple of days, our group has been experiencing difficulties assembling our filtration system. We haven’t built is yet because we don’t have the parts, but looking at our diagram we have run into problems that we didn’t think of at the beginning. First, the dirty water is supposed to go in through a PVC pipe. The frame is going to be quite tall, so the water might splash to the other side of the wall that is supposed to separate the dirty water and the clean water. Therefore, we will have to get a longer PVC pipe than planned. Also, the dirty water is to gather on the floor of the frame. The frame is made out of wood; we didn’t think about the fact the wood might rot or fall apart. My group has decided to put a bucket at the bottom of the frame to collect the water. The last difficulty we have is on whether or not PVC pipes give off a chemical when it is in heat for too long. We heard that this was possible and so we are concerned that this might happen because our system includes heat and evaporation. We researched and decided that if PVC pipe did not work then we would use hollow bamboo poles. This would be an easy alternative for the people in Africa because bamboo is easy to grow and is a natural material. Hopefully our problems with this system will work out eventually.




Our revised diagram: