Week 1 Day 4

UNT Water Research Facility

Today was field trip day! We drove over to the UNT Water Research Facility to see the tank farm that they are busy turning into an artificial stream ecosystem.  This is where the rubber meets the road for our project. Of the 21 tanks on site, they have 3 up and running as a proof of concept. The wireless probe system that we are developing will be deployed in these three tanks. Below is a video of Luke explaining the design of the system to our whole RET group.

Luke explaining the stream set up.

Get all that? Yeah, it was pretty long. here is the basic idea. There are three tanks that are about 6 feet across and three feet high. The tanks are connected by channels that connect them all into a system and will allow fish to travel from tank to tank. The tanks and channels are all filled with rock to help simulate a more realistic environment. There are no fish in there now because they have only had the tanks filled for about three days. They are not planning on planting anything. Instead they will depend on wild algae to populate the tanks. After they have given the algae some time to grow they will introduce some local fish from a nearby stream. They will start with some of the smaller prey fish like minnows and then eventually add a few predators like largemouth bass. The idea is the algae will oxygenate the water and keep the nitrogen cycle rolling as well as providing some food (along with insects that will migrate in on their own) for the prey fish. The prey fish will move all around the system but probably spend most of their time in the shallow water of the riffles. The predators like the bass will most likely make their home in the pools. That’s the theory, anyway. If they were positive of that then it wouldn’t make much sense to do all this... Anyway, they would like to be able to telemonitor the various environmental factors in the pools for sure and that is what we are working on. They would also like to be able to remotely view the pools and we are also going to work on a video system if we finish our probe project in a timely manner.

So, that's the over view. Lets break down what it takes to build this artificial stream.  It starts with these giant custom built tanks and channels for the ponds and riffles.

Once you have the tanks the next step is filling them with rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Lots of heavy rocks. Lots of heavy rocks that you need to remember to clean before you load because other wise you get to shovel them all out, clean them, and then put them back in. Just saying.

So now you have rocks in your tanks. That's nice. Did you remember to put in the ripple tubing so that you have a way to pump the water through the system? No? Guess who gets to grab a shovel... By the way, this is not the ideal set up. The guys working on this eventually intend to have a less intrusive way to move the water.

Ok, you have rocks, you have tubing to carry the water. How are you going to move the water? If you guessed a series of small trawling motors set in revere you get a gold star!

By the way, if you want to make sure you can control the water level it might help to have overflow drains. They are like the thing in your tub between the faucet and the drain. Just bigger.

So you put this all together and what do you get? Right, and artificial stream. Pretty cool, right?

So, at this point you can add fish, plants, what ever you like. It provides a (mostly) controllable ecosystem for a huge variety of projects. This is actually cutting edge stuff. there are only a few universities out there who are doing this kind of work right now so, go UNT.

While we were checking out the site we were also talking about the projects we would like to do in our classes. We all agree that having something like this in our classes would be awesome but the scale is just impossible for our rooms. You will recall from Day 2 of this blog that we had put together a parts list for a smaller scall model we could build at our schools. Well, in the shed at this facility they had a ton of these little plastic tubs just sitting around doing nothing. Joe asked and they said we could have some if we had a use for them. Sweet! Free stuff! (Trust me, that is exciting on our salaries.) We snagged 12 of the tubs (for those of you who aren't awesome at math there are three of us and our model system calls for four tubs so...) and got to work cleaning them out. Four of the tubs we grabbed already have a hole drilled in them because we are going to try two different styles. One that uses pvc pipe that is sized to fit the exisitng hole and another type using the gutter pieces to see if their are advantages to one style or the other. Cool, right?

Now, that is all stuff that is relevant to what we are working on but there is a lot of other stuff going on at this facility. Apparently they dug 42 ponds out here to do some hardcore research but after 5 years the funding dried up... then the ponds did. Its a shame how often you hear stories like that.

There was also another research group out there doing something with aquatic plants. There setup was like this:

Pretty cool setup for growing aquatic plants. It has absolutely nothing to do with our project, though. The reason I'm mentioning it here is because Joe found a good sized spider and managed to catch it feeding on video. If you are into that sort of thing you can watch these clips.

In the afternoon we were hitting the books again. If you're interested in wireless sensor networks you should probably read these:
Getting Started with XBee
XBee Tutorial

Joe's Journal

(Seriously, we talked about the retyping. Stop asking.)

For those of you who just couldn't make yourself sit through the 10 minute video explaining the stream system to the whole group here is a shorter one from when Luke explained it just to my research team.