The pilot plant sedimentation tank will be a verticle flow style tank and will only use a sludge blanket as its removal mechanism. This tank will be the first time that an AguaClara team has used a sludge blanket instead of plate settlers. As with other AguaClara designs, the tank will be run by the elevation head in the flocculator tank and will not require electricity. There are several design restraints due to the current set up at the pilot plant. There are 37'' of available water head at the end of the floculator which are available for our use. The piping connection between the flocculator tank and sedimentation tank also cannot have a shear value that excedes the max shear in the last baffle section ( GMax= 48.826 /s), or else the flocs made in the last section will be broken up.
The flow through the sedimentation tank has been limited to half of the flocculator tank flow so that it will be possible to construct a second tank sometime in the future to handle the other half of the flow. ideally this second tank would only use plate settlers so that we could make a comparison between a sludge blanket and plate settlers.