...
In the first experiment, a flow rate of 100 m/day was used simply to get an estimate of what level of removal the filter foam material could achieve. A flow rate of 100 m/day was chosen as it is a typical upflow velocity for an AguaClara sedimentation tank. An influent raw water turbidity of 5 NTU was used, which is the typical turbidity of effluent water from an AguaClara sedimentation tank. Alum was not added to the system as we wanted to test the filtering capacity of the foam in the worst case scenario, which is using the smallest level of particles that would be sent through the filter in real life.
Figure 1: Raw Water and Effluent Turbidity vs. time for a flow rate of 100 m/day
A few things to note about the graph above:
...