Week Three

This week all of the parts we ordered for our project have arrived. Our first plan of action was to make sure that it was possible to make the water boil the way we wanted. After testing, the water does indeed boil with the wire, but we want to make sure that it will do it in a timely matter. The water took a long time to heat up, about 20 minutes, but now we want to find a quicker way of heating as to make the water filter more reliable. 

Our first idea was to wrap the wire around the beaker in order to heat the water, but since that took so long we tried to put the wire inside of the water. After testing it with the wire inside the water, the water boiled a lot quicker, but when salt is dissolved in the water it will make putting the wire inside of the water very dangerous. We are trying to find a safe and efficient way of boiling the water, but it has been a little difficult. 

We have also gotten the pump to work, but the pump fills in the water extremely fast compared to how much of the water is being boiled. For the pump to pump in 50 mL of water, it takes about 1.43 seconds, and the water is barely even heating at that point. We are also working to develop a way to slow the pump down and have it work with the water instead of making the pump very inefficient and hard to control. We do not want the pump to be pumping extremely fast the entire time, it will cause the beaker to overflow and problem cause some other problems with the system.

Hopefully all of these problems will be solved soon, and if you are interested in what our final idea is, check in next week.