My son just completed three trials for the water filtration of "dirty water" for the science buddies project but had the sand and the carbon in the wrong order.
Should he redo these trial with the correct order? If he should redo, can he reuse the sand, carbon, and rocks from another substance he tests if he cleans it well?
Or
Should he test the rest of the substances with the wrong order?
Thank you.
Lisa
Water Filtration
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nguyenmccarty
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Re: Water Filtration
Hi, Lisa!
I'm not very familiar with water filtration methods, but I would expect that the order in which the dirty water is passed over/through different components could be a very important aspect of the filtration. For example, contaminants in the water that are normally removed in the (correct) first step could interfere with the ability of the second step to remove additional remaining contaminants. For this reason, he should definitely redo the trial in the correct order. (Although it could be an interesting extra layer/part of his data to compare the cleanliness of water filtered in the correct vs. incorrect order, to see how/whether the order was in fact important!
)
In terms of reusing the filtration materials, I would recommend using fresh/unused material if at all possible. Perhaps another expert can jump in with more thorough knowledge of water filtration, but the filtration materials presumably have a limit to how much contamination they can remove/retain from dirty water, and I don't know how you would be able to test the extent to which a good cleaning of the materials would be able to remove contaminants from the first round of experiments. It would therefore not be possible to know how well these materials are able to filter out additional contaminants if reused for subsequent rounds of testing.
Good luck!
I'm not very familiar with water filtration methods, but I would expect that the order in which the dirty water is passed over/through different components could be a very important aspect of the filtration. For example, contaminants in the water that are normally removed in the (correct) first step could interfere with the ability of the second step to remove additional remaining contaminants. For this reason, he should definitely redo the trial in the correct order. (Although it could be an interesting extra layer/part of his data to compare the cleanliness of water filtered in the correct vs. incorrect order, to see how/whether the order was in fact important!
)In terms of reusing the filtration materials, I would recommend using fresh/unused material if at all possible. Perhaps another expert can jump in with more thorough knowledge of water filtration, but the filtration materials presumably have a limit to how much contamination they can remove/retain from dirty water, and I don't know how you would be able to test the extent to which a good cleaning of the materials would be able to remove contaminants from the first round of experiments. It would therefore not be possible to know how well these materials are able to filter out additional contaminants if reused for subsequent rounds of testing.
Good luck!