At the plants in Honduras, the head loss through the lamella plates is much less than the head loss from the water flowing through the inlet ports. Because of this, the flow throughout the plate settlers isn't evenis uniformly distributed. To even out these flows, a geotextile foam is placed on top of the plate settler to create the same head loss through the lamella plates and the water flowing through the inlet ports.
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The same experimental set up is used for the experiments run with the plate settlers, with a slight addition to the systemapparatus. A tube is in the top of the sedimentation tank with a pump to pull water off the top. The water then goes through the foam where a pressure sensor attached to both sides of the foam measures the pressure difference. This is used to calculated the head loss through the foam. The water then flows to a turbidimeter to see if the foam filtered out any floc particles that made their way into the effluent.
Figure 1: Schematic of experimental apparatus
All of the calculations done performed for this experiment were done in MathCAD.