In order to achieve turbulent flow in our flocculator setup, we needed to figure out if our pumps can handle very high flow rates to get high Reynolds number. For turbulent flow, our target Reynolds number is 2500, with flocculator inner diameter of 0.6cm. The calculation shows that the flow rate needs to be at least 11.8 mL/s for turbulent flow. (With our current setup, the max flow rate is 3.1 mL/s) Thus, one of our solutions was to add more pump heads, since the max flow rate of pump is limited by how fast a pump head motor can rotate.
In order to test out how many additional pump heads are needed, we added in new set points to Process Controller method - "3-Alum Number of Heads" and "3-Clay Number of Heads". We found that 2 alum pump heads, 2 clay pump heads, and 3 raw water pump heads are sufficient to provide our target flow rate of 11.8 mL/s.