Development of an automatic flocculation tester for highly-efficient data acquisition

A new flocculation tester which automates mixing/stopping the suspended solution for flocculation processes and monitoring the turbidity of the supernatant or settling velocity of the flocculated particles on a real-time basis is developed to conduct the flocculation test with highly efficient data acquisition. To achieve the automatic mixing/stopping or monitoring, the Arduino microcontrollers are installed in our tester. For mixing/stopping, the DC motor is controlled by the sequence control. Moreover, PI control is implemented to control the motor speed accurately and robustly. For monitoring, the transmission photo sensor is installed to measure the turbidity or settling velocity. In this paper, the details of our proposed tester are presented. Also, the preparation of the calibration curve by using the spline interpolation method is presented and the validity of the calibration curve is investigated by experiments.