Rheological Characterization of Sludges during Belt Filtration Dewatering Using an Immobilization Cell
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 136, Issue 9
Abstract
An immobilization cell was successfully coupled to a controlled stress rheometer to quantify rheological properties of a sludge during its dewatering. An anaerobically digested sludge and a synthetic sludge were analyzed and conditioned at various doses with a cationic flocculant. Direct strain-controlled oscillatory analyses could not be performed due to rapid dewatering, but controlled shear rate analysis quantified the increases in sludge viscosity as the solid’s concentration increased. Immobilization times determined by these experiments—viscosity versus dewatering time—agree with capillary suction times, since both indicate the time required for water removal ( from 0.81 to 0.99). However, capillary suction time tests were more strongly influenced by filtrate viscosity at high polymer doses. The immobilization cell allowed quantified amounts of shear to be imposed during dewatering, with greater shearing found to provide more rapid immobilization. This finding is consistent with the design of belt filtration dewatering devices, but demonstrates that current models do not account for a critical aspect of this process.
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Acknowledgments
This study was done in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware. The first writer was financially supported by the Technical and Scientific Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK)-NATO Science Fellowship Program and by the U.S. National Science Foundation under Grant No. NSF0229293: Chemical, Rheological, and Physical Exploration of Gel-Like Behavior in Conditioning and Dewatering Processes. The writers acknowledge Ms. Melanie Boudreault of Anton Paar-Physica and Professor Norman J. Wagner and Dr. Young Sil Lee for valuable assistance in the UD Rheology Laboratory. The writers thank Dr. Johannes Mueller of the Technical University of Braunschweig for the synthetic sludge formulations.
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© 2010 ASCE.
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Received: Jun 5, 2009
Accepted: Jan 19, 2010
Published online: Jan 22, 2010
Published in print: Sep 2010
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