Experimental study on sludge adhesion reduction using surface electro-osmotic pulse

Abstract

The dewatering and drying of sludge are important to achieve volume reduction and resource utilization, while the sticky properties of sludge is one of the main problems in the dewatering and drying process. Therefore, reducing the viscosity of sludge and the amount of sludge adhesion is critical to improving the operating efficiency of drying equipment. In practice, the surface electro-osmosis has been used to reduce the adhesion of soil to a loading shovel, and electro-osmotic pulse is applied to a concrete structure to achieve humidity reduction. In this research, the effect of surface electro-osmosis pulse on reducing the adhesion of sludge is studied by using a periodically changing electric field combined with surface electroosmosis technology. The results showed that with surface electro-osmosis pulse, the sludge adhesion stress is reduced from 1514.7 to 820.5Pa at 45% water content within 10s, which indicates that surface electro-osmosis pulse has application value in dewatering and drying process.