Investigating the Effect of Wastewater Concentration on the Fall Velocity of Cohesive Sediments in Water Transfer Systems

Cohesive sediments are composed primarily of clay-sized material, which have strong interparticle forces due to their surface ionic charges. As particle size decreases, the interparticle forces dominate the gravitational force, and the settling velocity is no longer a function of only particle size. When, under certain conditions, the attractive forces exceed the repulsive ones, colliding particles stick together, forming agglomerations known as "flocs" with size and settling velocities much higher than those of the individual particles. This phenomenon is known as "flocculation" (Baldock et.al, 2004). In a flocculated cohesive sediment suspension, the settling unit is the floc rather than the individual particle. The settling velocity of cohesive sediment particles, also is called the fall velocity, is one of the key variables in the study of sediment transport and is important in understanding suspension, deposition, mixing and exchange processes (Partheniades, 2009). Adding a chemical solution in a mixture of water and sediment changes the physicochemical of the sediments and the flocculation of the clay particles may increase or decrease. Today, in many countries the wastewater is used for irrigation sector as an additional water resource. Wastewater in combination with other water resources change the physicochemical characteristics of the water and it causes changing in hydrodynamic behaviors which one of them is the effect of wastewater concentration on the fall velocity of cohesive sediments in channels and water transfer Systems (khastar-Boroujeni, 2018). Therefore this study focuses on the effect of urban wastewater on cohesive sediments transport to improve water quality and manage the irrigation systems. For this purpose, some experiments were carried out in an annular flume using a mixture of cohesive sediment and water with combination of three levels of wastewater for evaluating their effects on the fall velocity of cohesive sediments.