Allan Brooks, Rivu Dey, William Pennock
Abstract:
Over the Summer of 2013, the Tube Flocculator team's overall goal was to further the understanding of floc breakup in order to heighten flocculator performance. Specifically, this was done by examining a single clamp's effect on flocculation, as well as finding the optimal orifice size while using multiple clamps. The effects of the clamps were predicted to increase overall colloid aggregation which would prove beneficial for the next step in AguaClara's process: sedimentation. Based on the results found over this summer, some conclusions can be made. One conclusion based on the end-clamp experiments is that larger orifice sizes display lower mean residual turbidities. Another is that, for a 28-meter-long flocculator, an evenly-spaced sixteen-clamp configuration appears to be better than using no clamps, depending on the clamp size used. The the eight-clamp configuration appears to not be any more effective than a no-clamp control, while a four-clamp configuration appears to show improved flocculator performance for certain clamp sizes. In future work, these findings can be applied to the full scale flocculator in hopes that floc breakup will prove useful for plant performance.
