Experimental study on sediment-copper distributions in hyper-concentrated turbulent solid-liquid system

This study presents a special problem on vertical distribution for sediment and copper in hyper-concentrated turbulent solid-liquid system that is essentially different from the ordinary low-concentrated turbulent system. A resonance type turbulent simulation equipment is used for the experimental study in which a vertically uniform turbulent field of the mixture of loess and water is produced in a testing cylinder with a grille stirrer that moves up and down harmoniously with varying vibration frequencies. In order to compare the variations of the vertical profiles of sediment and copper in low- and hyper-concentrated solid-liquid system, different scenarios for input sediment content ranging from 5 to 800 kg/m3 was considered in the experimental studies. It was found that solids copper content increases with input sediment content, S0, and reaches its peak as S0 goes to 10 kg/m3 and then decreases rapidly with increasing input sediment content. Such a behavior is possibly resulted from the joint effect of the specific adsorption of copper on loess, precipitation of carbonate and hydroxide of copper due to high carbonate content in the loess and the so-called "particulate concentration effect" due to the present of the sediment variation in water. The vertical sediment concentration distribution resulted from the uniform turbulence is generally uniform, but slight non-uniformity does occur as sediment concentration exceeds certain value. However, the vertical concentration distributions of soluble copper seem not affected much by the variation of sediment concentrations.