Mechanisms of flow through compressible porous beds in sedimentation, filtration, centrifugation, deliquoring, and ceramic processing

The University of Houston research program is aimed at the specific area of solid/liquid separation including sedimentation, thickening, cake filtration, centrifugation, expression, washing, deep-bed filtration, screening, and membrane separation. Unification of the theoretical approaches to the various solid/liquid separation operations is the principle objective of the research. Exploring new aspects of basic separation mechanisms, verification of theory with experiment, development of laboratory procedures for obtaining data for design, optimizing operational methods, and transferring the results to industry are a part of the Houston program. New methodology developed in our program now permits an engineer or scientist to handle thickening, cake filtration, centrigual filtration, and expression in a unified manner. The same fundamental equations are simply adapted to the differing parameters and conditions related to the various modes of separation. As the system is flexible and adaptable to computational software, new developments can continually be added. Discussions of the various research projects in this report have been kept to a minimum and are principally qualitative. The length of the report would be excessive if each topic were covered in depth. Although the number of research topics may appear larger than one would expect, many are closely interconnected and reflect our philosophy of working in apparently diverse fields such as ceramics, mining, wastewater, food, chemical processing, and oil well operations