Spring 2009 Turbidity Profiles

Methods

• Hot-swapping Baffle Configurations

• PAC dosing

Polyaluminum chloride (PAC) is the coagulant of choice of the Cornell Water Treatment Plant as well as many other plants across the United States. According to plant workers PAC is much more forgiving than alum in terms of dosing and forms flocs better in colder water temperature, a shortfall of alum when testing in Ithaca. Dosing with PAC was set up at the Pilot Plant. Since our goal is to collect turbidity profiles of the tank based upon energy dissipation (the spacing of the baffles), by removing the added variable of determining the alum dosage by using the easier-to-dose PAC, the profiles will be more comparable in terms of effect of baffle spacing.

• Normalizing Data

In previous testings, many data samplings needed to be collected in one sitting to avoid having large fluctuations in turbidity which required experimenting and determining new alum dosages and lent itself to data that could not be directly compared. To keep our results consistent and relevant to one another every day of experimentation will start with a turbidity profile for a "normalizing" configuration, a configuration with .102 m baffle spacing so profiles can be adjusted based upon the results of the normalizing setup.

Calculations

Length of flocculator channel = 1.8288 m
K _baffle = 4
Π _cell = 4
w = .305 m
h = .764 m

Turbidity Profiles

Results and Findings