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Then we also found that if we instead increased the d60 from 0.55 to 0.9, the graph changed to Figure 4:
Figure
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4: Fluidization Velocity Experiment-d60 change
This shows that small errors in our d60 or porosity term could easily account for the major errors we have. Therefore, future experiments should carefully measure these properties before conducting experiments.
The above sources of error will be very difficult to control for the actual filtration design. Consequently, we surmise that we need to apply a safety factor of around 10-30% when applying the empirical fluidization velocity equation. The follow up experiments for multi-media experimentation with larger bench scale model will further specify the safety factor required and we expect the larger scale model to reduce the overall error.