Trash-Collecting Boom

Boom Design Drawings:

Purchase Spreadsheet

Boom Permitting

Boom Buoyancy and Collection Testing:

Our group purchased the necessary PVC piping and materials to reroute a water pump in the Hydrology lab of the C.E. Barnhart Building to feed this flume to test the buoyancy and collection capabilities of the boom.

The buoyancy of the smaller version of the boom we built was perfect, even without sealing the caps on the end of the boom, like would be done when the full boom was built for Waterford Pond.

We ran into trouble with the existing dammed end of the flume that caused the water to pool in the flume, rather than flowing as the water would in a channel. We disassembled as much of the dam as possible (as seen in the picture above on the right). but the discharge was still not high enough to allow the water to really flow to see how the boom collected floating debris. The few plastic bottles and rubber duck (as seen in the middle picture above) did get stopped at the boom and re-routed to the downstream most end of the boom as designed.