Solving Drought
Our Creative Engineering Design was to solve drought. We decided to create a big tank to help the California drought and our group came up with The Desalination Tank. This machine turns salt water into fresh water in a heated solar powered tank. These big domes will be located along the California coast so the water can be easily reached and used. This new dome will have a tank of salt water with a pipe that leads to the tank. The tank will be super wide but only a couple feet deep so the water could easily be evaporated. Our heat supply will be solar powered and will heat up the salt water into steam on cloudy days. On sunny hot days, the sun will evaporate the water through the glass that creates our dome. The steam will rise to the top of the dome and collect into water droplets. The droplets will slip down the side of the dome into little pools that will all lead to a fresh tank. This tank will always be on and will help us with our water shortage.
Engineering Design Cycle
1- Define the Problem / Identify the Need 2- Research 3- Brainstorm solutions 4- Choose a plan 5- Construct prototype 6- Test and Evaluate 7- Redesign or Communicate |
Our Engineering Design Cycle
1- Solving Drought 2- Droughts in America, Least rainfall, People effected 3- Water saving shower head, Desalination 4- Desalination Tank (Salt water into Fresh Water) 5- Build a tank with a glass dome around it 6- Test if water tight, if the water evaporates into fresh water 7- Tweak and fix prototype, present to class |
Reflection:
Our group was a very positive working group. It consisted of Camille, Hana, Sebastian and I. We were a very chatty group and we all got off task very easily. We should spent our time more usefully before we knew that we were going to loose two days of work due to a big rain storm. That brings up another problem we had, called time management. This has been a factor throughout the semester but this time we ran out of time and had to cram lots of stuff in. It was very stressful to our group and we had only one real day left to get everything ready for our presentation. That day were all worked hard and together to complete whatever we had to complete. In the end we had a good presentation and a very cool 3D design of our Desalination Tank. I really liked our group and it was a fun three weeks to be working with new people.
Our Prototype