General Program Information

The program draws square ports on alternating sides of the lower baffles. The ports must be drawn on alternating sides so that when the plant in running, water does not have the opportunity to flow in a straight path through the flocculator (thus bypassing the mixing.)

Technical Program Information

This program contains a function that calculates the time required to drain the flocculator for a particular flocculator geometry. The time to drain the flocculator is determined by calculating the flow for a particular port size out of the "tanks" formed between baffles over a small time increment. The time increments are then added until it is found that each "tank" is empty.

Using this time function, another function returns the port size needed to drain the flocculator within a given amount of time. This function assumes that the ports drawn in the baffles are the same size as the valve used to drain the floc tank. This assumption is made because the ports limit the drain rate as long as the valve is slightly larger than the ports. This function then iterates among the available port sizes until the time required to drain is no greater than 110% of the desired time.