The pilot project would go from eight monitoring locations up to 21, which would ultimately cost an estimated $350,000 to $400,000. Arabi claims that this investment could be repaid eight to 10 times over the next five years by reducing wastewater treatment costs.

Arabi  is hoping to start installing the monitors next month with the help of CSU engineering students and have the system in place by October.  This depends upon getting government support and financial and in-kind assistance from partners in the private sector.  Arabi has received tentative commitments from Hach Co. and In-Situ for the first eight water monitors.

This pilot project is part of the Water Innovation Network, a partnership Arabi  is developing with CSU, local government and the water cluster.  WIN's goal is to create a "truly integrated collaboration" that would seek to "advance the development, demonstration and commercialization of clean water technologies.  Arabi believes a successful WIN pilot project could help the region's economy in many ways.   “This is a great opportunity for the people of Colorado as it is focused on creating infrastructure that attracts new companies, lets existing companies spotlight their equipment and helps CSU students. And it really benefits government agencies to be good stewards of the environment and better manage their resources,” said Arabi.

As a result of a multi-year effort supported by the Major Research Instrumentation grant from the National Science Foundation, a research team headed by Dr. B. Bienkiewicz has developed unique instrumentation designed to enhance wind tunnel assessments of wind induced loading on buildings and other structures, and on renewable energy systems (e.g. photovoltaic installations, wind turbines).

Fig. 1 Overall View of Pressure Measurement System		Fig. 2 Wind Tunnel Testing Configuration

The developed system consists of two 512-channel subsystems controlled by a personal computer (PC). Each sub-system consists of eight 64-channel scanners. The synchronized acquisition of the pressure data from the 1024 channels is accomplished using the two subsystems simultaneously triggered by a command sent by the PC. The acquired data is buffered to a mass storage device of the PC, thus enabling acquisition of long data records. The pressures can be acquired (nearly simultaneously) at each of the 1024 channels, at a high sampling rate. As shown in Fig. 1, the scanners are tightly packaged in each sub-system. As a result, the 1024-channel system can be integrated with the supporting structure of the wind tunnel turntable, directly underneath a tested model, see Fig. 2.

The main pneumatic and electronic components of the system - the pressure scanners, control pressure modules and other hardware, and associated software - were provided by Scanivalve Corp. (SC), of Liberty Lake, WA. The overall integration of the system was developed by the researchers and students affiliated with WEFL. Assistance in these efforts was provided by the technical personnel from SC. This collaboration was invaluable in resolving a number of technical issues and ensuring optimized and reliable performance of the integrated system.

Preliminary testing of the system was carried out in December 2009, in a large boundary-layer wind tunnel – the Meteorological Wind Tunnel – at WEFL. The performed tests indicated an overall excellent performance of the system. The obtained unique datasets are currently being analyzed. As soon as the validation efforts are completed, an extensive wind tunnel testing program utilizing the developed system and focused on comprehensive evaluation of wind loading on buildings will be initiated.

Significant contributions to the above project were made by D. Boyajian (electronic technician) and M. Endo ( Ph.D. Candidate and WEFL Manager).

The efforts on the system integration led to development of Compact Packaging Scheme for Pressure Measurement Transducers. A provisional patent for this technology has been filed via CSUVentures (ID: CSURF 08-042).