COMPUTATIONAL STUDIES ON THE FLOW CHARACTERISTICS ESTIMATION IN SETTLING PONDS

A settling pond stores the mine drainage for a given period which leads to the precipitation of the ferric hydroxide found in the mine drainage, so that the remediation of the contaminated effluents can be accomplished. Until now, the nominal retention time was calculated simply as the ratio of the volume of mine drainage stored in a pond to the flow rate and used for a settling pond design. In this study, numerical flow analysis has been conducted to investigate the optimal flow characteristics and help for the settling pond design.