Vertical Flow Hydraulic Flocculator
Overview
Currently, the AguaClara team has built a new, more robust baffle system for the small scale vertical flow hydraulic flocculator that models flocculation tanks built in plants in Honduras. This new baffle system allows for faster and easier adjustments to baffle spacing and arrangement. With the ability to adjust the spacing quickly, turbidity profiles of the tank can be compared for different baffle arrangements to determine which configurations work best for different raw water turbidities and will help verify the equations used by the Design team for energy dissipation. Uniform baffle spacing and tapered spacing will be tested. In tapered flocculation the flocs are exposed to high velocity gradients in the beginning of the tank and lower gradients as they travel through the tank. The key to having reliable and pertinent results is to keep the main variable, raw water turbidity, as standard as possible, meaning that multiple tests need to be run on the same day, when turbidity is over a small range. Having an easily and quickly adjustable baffle system will allow us to run multiple configurations in a short time period, making our results directly comparable to one another.
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