A college project could save water treatment plants thousands of dollars by making the monitoring of a filtration process totally automatic.
Some Confederation College students displayed their projects to industry partners and supporters at a demonstration Tuesday. The 60 students, all in their third year electrical engineering technology program, were tasked with finding a way to use engineering to control the world around them.
One of those projects was a digital imaging system for water treatment plants. Jordan Laing and Jeff Belanger researched and wrote software that will help automate parts of the water filtration process that still requires a technician to conduct manually.
“We haven’t had tremendous amount of success but we’ve managed to get some really good results,” he said. “It can be done. There aren’t any commercially available solutions that I know of for this project. We’ve pretty much made it from the ground up.”
Laing said it can be costly for a plant to do a jar tests for a now-manual process known as flocculation. Although the system needs some refinement, taking the project to the next step all depends on how much the college wants to invest.
“The approach we took is very simple,” he said. “We just capture an image condition with software and use algorithms to count floc. We’re taking a picture of an area that’s only square inches. You just need a window that you’re trying to process and it works.”
Laing’s teacher Raymond Mayer said the projects allow students to learn on their own a bit and to try to create something with a practical mindset.
“A lot of industry people come to look at these projects,” he said. “It gets these people out and looking at what the students are doing. They get to learn some of the skills that are taught here.”
