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1. Only laminar flow occurs in tube flocculators.
2. Colloids cannot attach to large flocs at maximum size thus we need to break those flocs to maintain continuous growth.
3. At low coagulant doses, the residual turbidity is relatively high because the attachment efficiency is not big enough to allow flocs to form. With the increase of coagulant dose, attachment efficiency rises so the residual turbidity is lowered.
4. Discrete settling is assumed in analysis of data since the distance Z is much less than the 0.5m interval between sampling ports used in conventional flocculant settling tests.
5. Flocs will collide and grow when they travel from one breakup position to another.
6. Broken flocs can aggregate with small colloids with the same attachment efficiency.
Control Experiments
Experimental Method
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Figure 2 demonstrates the compared results of residual turbidity with floc breakup and without floc breakup. Obviously, the residual turbidity are lower when breaking the flocs using clamps. At the alum dose 4, 4.6 and 5.2 mg/L, the difference of residual turbidity curve reaches 10 NTU. Both curve seems to fit into the logarithmic trend line -- the one with floc breakup matches the trend line even with a correlation coefficient of 0.9934. The results not only proves indicate that our hypothesis "large flocs are useless" is right correct but also offers us insight into improving AguaClara's current flocculator design.
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The Predictive model is supposed to be updated based on the experimental data after floc breakup device was installed. An approach to develop this model is to insert trend line to our existing experimental data and pick the best relationship for turbidity removal versus alum dose curve. Next we need to check how variables are changed after installation of floc breakup. Figure 3 indicates that the logarithmic type fits the data the best with a regression equation of y = 0.2062x -0.0078 and a relation coefficient of 0.9931.
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The capacity of flocculator is based on it's ability to cause collisions between particles. Breaking large flocs that allow more collisions to happen is may be helpful to achieve higher turbidity removal. Thus we need to design a special component that can break up flocs at regular intervals. This For laboratory experiments, this special component can be an orifice or a wire mesh set at a size that correlates with the maximum desired energy dissipation rate or carefully add some baffles in between.