Yielding and Flow in Aggregated Particulate Suspensions

Abstract

The flow and consolidation of strongly flocculated particulate suspensions in water are common to a range of processing scenarios in the minerals, food, water and wastewater industries. Understanding the compressive strength or resistance to consolidation of these suspensions is relevant to processes such as filtration, centrifugation and gravity settling, where the compressive strength defines an upper boundary for processing. New data for the compressive strength of consolidating flocculated particulate suspensions in water, including alumina and calcium carbonate, are compared with earlier data from the literature and from our own laboratories for several systems, including two earlier se..