IF GCE Portfolio: Creating Clean water

In unit 2 of my Water class I had to make a water filter that would clean water in any way. My water filter is the one below, and I used a few materials to make the filter. Using only small pieces of activated carbon, large gravel rocks, small gravel rocks, and cloth I was able to change the original water’s pH from 3.8 to 4.6 which are both very acidic. I originally thought that the water filter was going to go worse than it did, because the first time I tried to make the filter all the materials mixed together which is not what you want when making a filter.

I built my water filter using the materials I listed earlier, bottle, and scissors. First I cut a hole in the top of the bottle and cut the bottom off, then screwed the top of the bottle back on. Then I filled it with the needed layers with the charcoal first, small gravel rocks second and large gravel rocks third. Next I put the cloth on the top of the bottle covering up the hole and one at the top covering up the cut. A water filter that simple had the highest pH difference in my class. I was really pleased by how the filter turned out. I had the perfect amount of materials and the wrong and right plan to get the job done. It’s pretty rewarding to fail and later get such a big success from a mistake.

To test how well my water filter would function I tested dirty river water from the Chicago river, and to really test how well the filter worked I added even more dirt to the water than there already was. The top layer caught all the large pieces and chunks of dirt that were in the river water, while the gravel and carbon caught the rest of the small pollutants. Once again, to my surprise there was a lot of clean looking water left over in the flask. The water that had gone through the filter was at a 4.6 level on the pH scale and was still pretty acidic and personally was not worth drinking nor would it be worth tasting. The water was still really murky and turbid which is another hint towards not drinking the water. Though the water did end up smelling much more close to tap water than dirt.

A lot of water filters work like groundwater filtration, were the water travels through a lot of materials through the ground. First the filter collected large pieces of contaminants and the smaller pieces of gravel collect small contaminants throughout the water. Acidic water tastes like metal most of the time so I imagine the filtered water tastes like metal.

Before pH test: 3.8 pH -log x =.8 10^.8 = x x= 6.31
After pH test : 4.6 pH
pH change : 0.8 pH