Thickened Sludge - Pump head calculations

[Payam Malek]

Hi all,
We are in the process of designing a new sludge feed pumps for a centrifuge system (sludge dewatering). The feed is a thickened sludge + poly (what the pumps see) and the site is a clean water treatment work.
To calculate the sludge pump head, we would require a number of fluid properties at three DS levels (3%, 4%, and 8.5%). The properties required are Consistency Index, Laminar Viscosity, Turbulent viscosity and Static Resistance.
Unfortunately, the most of data available in the literature are from various sludge types form wastewater treatment works (primary, activated, AD digestate, etc.).
I was wondering if anyone here might have previous experience of designing pump head for a clean water thickened sludge? Or perhaps have the above fluid properties or a reference we can use?

Many thanks

Payam

 

[bimr]

Are you referring to a water treatment sludge not a wastewater sludge?

 

[Payam Malek]

Yes, that is correct

 

[bimr]

And what is the water treatment process?

 

[Payam Malek]

Common Clean Water treatment, abstraction from river, and a number of filtration and clarification stages with the sludge from these solid removal processes is being thickened and then dewatered using centrifugal systems. Our design is for the poly system and sludge feed pumps to the centrifuge system.

 

[LittleInch]

Well "sludge" is a pretty vague term.

You might be better off looking at mining slurries and pastes.

Usually you want to keep everything moving at a decent velocity (1m/sec+ to keep it all in suspension and stop blockages etc.

What's this +poly stuff? Pplyethlyene pipe or something else?

Remember - More details = better answers
Also: If you get a response it's polite to respond to it.

 

[bimr]

In the past, most water treatment sludges were discharged to open pits so there is limited information available.

In general, since this is a dilute sludge, the sludge characteristics for this application will be similar to water. If your treatment system is very large, you may consider the use of a pilot plant to optimize the design.

Have you considered a sludge press over a centrifuge for this application?