Clay Concentration in Stock Solution for Desired Influent Turbidity

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A clay suspension is used to feed the turbid water to the flocculator. During the summer 2007, the flocculator group used a stock suspension of 3,000 NTU. We wanted to reproduce the stock suspension of 3,000 NTU but needed to determine what turbidity would be produced from a given suspension of kaolin clay. The influent turbidity is user defined in Process Controller, and the program will dictate the flow rate of the clay suspension into the setup in order to achieve the influent turbidity.

Arbitrarily adding clay to reach a certain turbidity is ineffective and wastes time. Past research did not include any relationship between the amount of clay added and the respective final turbidity of the stock solution. We designed a simple experiment to determine what amount of kaolin clay should be added per liter to create a desired turbidity.

The experiment ran by adding different amounts of kaolin clay (50 mg, 100 mg, 250 mg, 500 mg, and 1000 mg) to 1 L of water and measuring the turbidity of the mixture with the Hach 2100 N table turbidimeter. The amount of clay was weighed on an electric scale. The solution was hand mixed for several minutes before pouring into the glass cuvette tubes. The cuvette tubes were wiped with Kim wipes before being placed in the turbidimeter. Since the meter could not adequately read turbidity readings above 200 NTU, we only tested up to this maximum turbidity value and calculated a regression curve based on the sampled data points using Microsoft Excel. After the relationship was determined, a new stock concentration of 3,000 NTU was made using this regression formula.

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