Summary for Friday January 15th

Since only a small number of us were apparently aware of the origins of our local drinking/bathing/teeth brushing water, we began today's discussion with a look at the Maury Service Authority and the source of the water that it provides for the City of Lex and some of the more densely populated areas of Rockbridge County. We used Google Earth to look at the locations of the Water Treatment Facility and the WWTP that we rely upon daily.

We then switched over to a discussion of evaporation with a review of bonding in within (polar covalent) and between (hydrogen) water molecules and why this is important in determining some of the properties of water (specifically with respect to evaporation). We also discussed humidity measurements and the effect of temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind speed on the rate of evaporation before entering into a discussion of the "applications" of evaporation:

(a) minimizing evaporation
(b) using evaporation to reduce the volume of waste water
(c) evaporative cooling

Our discussion of these applications began with a look at the rates of evaporation from Lake Mead.

PowerPoint slides shown in lecture today are now available as a .pdf on Sakai.

Please read chapter 5 of Manning for class on Monday.

Also, I have been made aware of three outside lecture opportunities that are relevant to this course.