Performance and flow field assessment of settling tanksusing experimental and CFD modeling

Abstract

Settling Basins are one of the most important and popular methods for removal of suspended sediments irrigation and drainage networks or power canals taking off from an alluvial river and wastewater treatment plant. Improving the performance and so increasing sediment removal efficiency of settling basins by an alternative method is necessary. In the present work, the effect of baffle and its angle of attack with the flow (9) on the sediment removal efficiency is investigated by conducting a series of experiments on a straight canal with 8 m length, 0.3 m width and 0.5 m height and 3 m length of basin equipped with an adjustable glass baffle. A numerical analysis has been carried out using ANSYS Fluent 3D software (a general purpose computational fluid dynamics simulation tool) for three Froude numbers from the experiments. The numerical and experimental results were found to match reasonably well.