Cleaning and maintenance of lamellar systems
posted in Technical Articles by TecnoConverting
Some time ago one of our customers asked us if it was necessary to do any maintenance on the lamellar settler, the answer is undoubtedly yes.
Several reasons oblige to perform maintenance:
In lamellar settlers preferential channels are created, these are areas within the settler, which by its geometry causes the water and suspended solids to choose preferential paths within the lamellar system. And this occurrence causes that the lamellar modules do not work uniformly, in other words, parts of the lamella that performs better or worse than others.
These areas or preferential paths accumulate suspended solids; causing clogging of the tube channels and eventually with time the lamellar becomes saturated and filled with sludge in different areas.
This causes that some areas on the lamellar system can weight 100 times more than the lamella without sludge, and with this overweight the lamellar support structure can be overloaded until it collapses. Besides, as mentioned earlier, this overload is not distributed homogeneously, and there can be areas of the understructure that are hold 1,000 kg and other parts that support 60 kg.
Another reason for these problems is an inefficient sludge extraction system, if we calculate the amount of suspended solids on the inlet and multiply by the inflow (m3 / h), we have the amount of sludge generated by the lamellar system, if all this sludge is not removed from settler, it will start to rise and eventually clog the lamellar, with the same result described above, the collapse of the support structure.
We have seen lamellar systems clogged due to the bad functioning of the rectangular. This caused the raise of the Thomson channels in GRP of the installation before the under support structure collapse.
Hence the importance of a good system for sludge removal, robust and reliable, that even if the scraper stops at least notify the plant responsible so they can take necessary actions.
With these examples, we hope we made clear the importance of lamellar cleaning and maintenance. Below we are pleased to present you our last edition of the lamellar maintenance manual recently published.
