What we have learned already is that there is some increase in head loss in the hydrophobic tubing.
It is possible that the rate of increase in head loss is increasing around hour 9 although there isn't enough data to be sure.
I have another strategy to get around the loss of coagulant to the flocculator walls. Is it possible that we could operate a flocculator at a sufficiently high shear such that no attachment occurs? Perhaps the level of shear required to prevent attachment is a function of the polarity of the tubing and perhaps we could reach this shear level in the first part of a two stage flocculator.
There are two possible shear levels of interest here. First is the shear level that prevents attachment and the second is the shear level that removes attached nanoparticles. You could quickly find the shear level required to remove attached nanoparticles by repeatedly cycling the flow rate between the 300 Hz level and increasingly higher levels (first 400 Hz, then 500 Hz, then 750 Hz) while returning to 300 Hz after each high G to see if the head loss has changed.
Perhaps this very high G would be used initially to give the coagulant nanoparticles time and shear to get them to attach to clay particles and then a lower G could be used to enable growth of larger flocs.
What we have learned already is that there is some increase in head loss in the hydrophobic tubing.
It is possible that the rate of increase in head loss is increasing around hour 9 although there isn't enough data to be sure.
I have another strategy to get around the loss of coagulant to the flocculator walls. Is it possible that we could operate a flocculator at a sufficiently high shear such that no attachment occurs? Perhaps the level of shear required to prevent attachment is a function of the polarity of the tubing and perhaps we could reach this shear level in the first part of a two stage flocculator.
There are two possible shear levels of interest here. First is the shear level that prevents attachment and the second is the shear level that removes attached nanoparticles. You could quickly find the shear level required to remove attached nanoparticles by repeatedly cycling the flow rate between the 300 Hz level and increasingly higher levels (first 400 Hz, then 500 Hz, then 750 Hz) while returning to 300 Hz after each high G to see if the head loss has changed.
Perhaps this very high G would be used initially to give the coagulant nanoparticles time and shear to get them to attach to clay particles and then a lower G could be used to enable growth of larger flocs.