Location of the Study
Preparing the Equipment (DIY only)
Measuring the dimensions of the river including the depth where the floating trap must be positioned.
Measuring the Velocity and discharge of the river.
Making a mini version of the river to simulate its velocity
Doing a prototype and testing it to capture the relevant parts of the trap.
Fron view of the trap within the river. The process includes series of calculations before we were able to come up with the final design.
Hello everyone! It has been a while since my last major blog. For the last few days, I’m trying to still be attached here in hive by posting in liketu to express and share my week to the platform and to the people who are using it. So, for today I’m going to share with you something relevant in our society and also to spread awareness around the world.
Have you heard the word “thesis”? I’m sure and certain that you already heard, and you might also experience doing it when you were still studying in college to finish your degree. Just a little background, I am already a graduate with my bachelor’s degree in Civil Engineering (I am also posting a major blog about it). But before that most awaited moment of my life happened, I cried, laugh, and always sleep late just to finish some chapters and submit them to our instructor for some corrections and revisions. It was a crazy experience, especially in Civil Engineering there must be a prototype created to make sure that the product will work and be feasible in the location of the study.
The Process
Before we went through the process, our instructor asked us to look for groupmates and each group must be composed of 5 members. Fortunately, I and my partner found our groupmates right away. Fast forward, after trying to submit plenty of titles and topics to our instructor, finally, our topic and title were approved. I am not going to mention the title of our study here, but our topic is all about how to lessen or mitigate the effects of plastic waste in the river we had chosen to be the subject of our study. As civil engineers, we can create a device or something that can mitigate the floating trash in the river. Since it will clog and causes the rise of the water level in the river. With that, our goal is to propose a design of a floating trash trap that will permanently trap the floating trash in the river. First, to gather data we need to conduct a survey in the river. By improvising some materials, we were able to measure the depth of the part of the river where the floating trap will be stationed. By also using an engineering method, we were able to use the discharge and velocity of the river. It was not difficult to conduct the survey however we were having difficulties in the location itself because it is really a polluted river, and it is also difficult to access. However, we finished and succeeded in the first part of our project. After a month of analyzing and arranging the data we had, we created a prototype of the product. Since it is still a prototype there were plenty of errors in the design and concept. After that, we had to do the most difficult part of the paper, Chapter 4: Analyzing and Presentation of Data. It was a difficult stage because we missed some data. However, we had it fixed and finally, our paper is ready for the final defense. Our final defense was not that complicated, and the panelists approved our paper, and just make some minimal revisions. It was a tough journey but worth it.
The Final Output
This output was originally made by my group using AutoCAD with the materials and dimensions of the proposed design.
Why did we choose this study area?
This question will fall in the rationale part of the study. We want people to learn from their mistakes. The floating trap is just an instrument. Theoretically, we want to collect the floating trash to avoid the rise in water level in the river which will cause floods and will affect the residents in the area. However, if you dig deeper, the floating trap is just a manifestation of Earth’s condition. And we hope that we will learn the basic and proper way of throwing our garbage. There are also plenty of ways to recycle plastic waste. I hope we all know that the life of this planet lies in our hands.
I hope you learned something from this article guys. It was a long journey, and I can’t narrate all the events that happened since it took us a year to finish our study (yes, because I’m a regular graduating student and my loads and schedule are really full).