Founding of Biocoil project:

-SEWAGE SISTERS
The study of limnology (fresh water from the earth’s surface) was an important aspect in the class of Advanced Biology. By understanding the concept of limnology, the students of years past were required to know all that was needed in dealing with sewage treatment. Each year students designed projects to study; in hopes of someday their ideas would be used to help mankind and his environment. The students had learned that the Cascade Reservoir was suffering due to the process of eutrophication, (aging of the lake by excess of nutrients, water becoming more shallow, plant overgrowth) or in this case, cultural eutrophication, being that the lake is man made, this process has occurred more rapidly than that of natural lakes. Among the individuals who worked on the water treatment, four students who claimed themselves to be the “Sewage Sisters,” were determined to fix the problem. Finding information from a small article in a “ National Geographic” magazine, the article featured a British company called Biotechna. The article praised about a new sewage system, one that looked promising. It was called the Biocoil.

06'-07' Achievments

-We, (Amanda, Jasmyn, Keith and Charles) the current members of the Biocoil team overtook the project from the last group from 2005-06 (link to explanation of Biocoil). When we took over the job, the tubes had just been replaced on the Biocoil from last year. Although there were new tubes, everything else, including the pump, the CO2 tank, and roofing were quite a few years old and needed to be replaced. At the beginning of the year, the Biocoil project started out good and we were finally starting to get the Biocoil functioning the way it’s supposed to. Unfortunately, we had some mishaps over the winter, which caused the manifold to break.
Now that we have the Biocoil almost up and running, we recently developed a partnership with a man from Australia named Llyod Godson(Link To His Page). He is designing a BioSub, which allows him to live underwater temporarily.

-When we first got the project at the beginning of the year our first major step was to get the Biocoil running again. The pump we had was causing major problems because it wouldn’t let us open all the valves on the manifold so we could get it running correctly. After talking to numerous pump technicians we finally found someone who would come down and look at it. He figured the problem out (the wires were wired incorrectly) and got the Biocoil running again.
We have started to rebuild the Biocoil and it’s almost running, but we had to fix some minor problems with the tube seals and a missing part

-Biocoil Problems & Rebuilding
On September 6, 2005, we realized that we were overloading our pump and it wasn’t working correctly. We tried fixing the pump ourselves by cleaning it out and tightening the valves on the manifold. We had called several pump technicians asking why our pump wouldn’t work. After hearing about these problems, some technicians had said that we had too big or too small of a pump. Finally, we called a local pump engineer to come and check out our pump. He found that our voltage was wired incorrectly. The pump was wired so that 220 volts were running to 110 volts, instead of 220 volts running to 220 volts. Due to his discovery, we were able to run the Biocoil correctly.
In the middle of December we ran into our first major problem. The Biocoil tubes and pipes froze. The door was left open which allowed the cold air in and caused the Biocoil to freeze. Since the tubes were frozen, the manifold also froze and cracked open and the water drained out.

Future Goals of BioSub:

1. Get the BioSub running smoothly with no gliches.
2. Run more specific tests, and use the test results to write a research paper.
3. Next step: take our idea to NASA, and live in outerspace.