While the Laboratory applied its engineering knowledge to problems of filtration, we can study filtration to expand your engineering knowledge. IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional society, has a Filtration Investigation lesson plan that we’ll use to learn about the engineering process. (Teachers, the IEEE website has resource sheets, information, and activity worksheets for your classroom.) Your challenge is as follows: along with your engineering teammates, design a filtration system to eliminate as much dirt, coffee grinds, or flour as possible from a water sample. This experiment should take about two (2) hours, including planning.
Already you may notice that we are following our engineering design process: we, the clients, have identified a problem for you, the engineers, to solve. Let’s take a moment now to start asking the “whys” before you ask the “hows.”
