Flocculation is widely used as an effective phase separation technique across many process industries such as water and wastewater treatment and in minerals processing. In this work, a new pre-treatment technique was developed using a patented bench scale reactor unit as a technical proof of concept. Furthermore, the book provides a valuable insight into the hydrodynamics and fluid-particle interactions within the agglomeration units.

The relatively high solids content of the stable pellets (approximately 30 %) and very low residual turbidity of the post-sedimentation supernatant (7 NTU) clearly demonstrate the potential of this technique. In addition to significantly improving the subsequent solid-liquid separation efficiency, this study also showed that the effluent can be recycled back into the sewer network or utilized for non-portable reuse. The findings obtained from this research will be extremely useful in the scaling up and optimization of the reactor system.