I've been toying with these things for a few months and couldn't believe the results, so I waited longer. At this point they've been running several months, and there's no denying the results......
Some of you might be like me and enjoy building stuff like filters. Well, this concept blew my mind. Radial Flow Separators are simply a vessel that changes the direction of the flow of water. When the water changes direction guess what happens to the solids? They keep falling, in this case they fall out of the water column and sit on the bottom of the vessel.
I built mine out of a pair of plastic 55 gallon drums, and a water softener barrel. Concept is the water flows in through a 3" bulk head fitting in the side of the drum at the bottom. From the fitting there's 2 45 degree elbows then a standpipe about a foot tall, this pipe is dead center in the middle of the drum. So now you have water flowing straight up the center of the drum. Now the drum lids were cut off, and the water softener barrel cut in half, and the lid re attached. Each of the water softener barrel halves were attached to the lids of the 55 gallon drums. Water is then forced to travel back down to the bottom of the 55 gallon drums because of the softener drum, then back up the outside of the water softener barrel to the drains that are in the side of the 55s towards the top (sets water level). The poo is heavier then water, therefore will not travel back up the RFS drains, but rather sit on the bottom of the drum. I simply remove the lids of the drums (which the water softener halves are attached to) and siphon out the poo every week.
Now I had little to no faith in this concept working so that's why there's no valves in the bottom of the drums, otherwise a simple valve cracking would clean all the crap out. Now that it works next step is conical bottomed drums with valves on the bottom. You could even get fancy and run automated valves on timers and you could simply flush the crap out as often as you wanted.......
This design blows vortex settling chambers out of the water. So much more efficient. I believe this is the answer for the stringy ray poo that wreaks havoc on most means of mechanical filtration..... These things in my eyes are the ideal 1st stage of mechanical filtration, and prolong the life of filter socks a bunch.
I made the mistake of skipping a week and believe it or not there was enough crap in the bottom that it actually plugged the siphon to the point where I ended up using a pump to pump the crap out......
It's crazy what comes out of these things, and I'm not even running the desired lower flow rates. I'm running a 4300 gph pump per 55 gallon radial flow separator. I'd love to see what a properly tuned thought out design would do. I didn't put much time or thought into mine, cause like I said, I didn't think it would work that well. I was dead wrong. Again.
Here's a vid of what came out of one after a week.
[YT]Q1JfUzPhfiw[/YT]
Some of you might be like me and enjoy building stuff like filters. Well, this concept blew my mind. Radial Flow Separators are simply a vessel that changes the direction of the flow of water. When the water changes direction guess what happens to the solids? They keep falling, in this case they fall out of the water column and sit on the bottom of the vessel.
I built mine out of a pair of plastic 55 gallon drums, and a water softener barrel. Concept is the water flows in through a 3" bulk head fitting in the side of the drum at the bottom. From the fitting there's 2 45 degree elbows then a standpipe about a foot tall, this pipe is dead center in the middle of the drum. So now you have water flowing straight up the center of the drum. Now the drum lids were cut off, and the water softener barrel cut in half, and the lid re attached. Each of the water softener barrel halves were attached to the lids of the 55 gallon drums. Water is then forced to travel back down to the bottom of the 55 gallon drums because of the softener drum, then back up the outside of the water softener barrel to the drains that are in the side of the 55s towards the top (sets water level). The poo is heavier then water, therefore will not travel back up the RFS drains, but rather sit on the bottom of the drum. I simply remove the lids of the drums (which the water softener halves are attached to) and siphon out the poo every week.
Now I had little to no faith in this concept working so that's why there's no valves in the bottom of the drums, otherwise a simple valve cracking would clean all the crap out. Now that it works next step is conical bottomed drums with valves on the bottom. You could even get fancy and run automated valves on timers and you could simply flush the crap out as often as you wanted.......
This design blows vortex settling chambers out of the water. So much more efficient. I believe this is the answer for the stringy ray poo that wreaks havoc on most means of mechanical filtration..... These things in my eyes are the ideal 1st stage of mechanical filtration, and prolong the life of filter socks a bunch.
I made the mistake of skipping a week and believe it or not there was enough crap in the bottom that it actually plugged the siphon to the point where I ended up using a pump to pump the crap out......
It's crazy what comes out of these things, and I'm not even running the desired lower flow rates. I'm running a 4300 gph pump per 55 gallon radial flow separator. I'd love to see what a properly tuned thought out design would do. I didn't put much time or thought into mine, cause like I said, I didn't think it would work that well. I was dead wrong. Again.
Here's a vid of what came out of one after a week.
[YT]Q1JfUzPhfiw[/YT]