C-330 Lamella Clarifier and Tube Settler — Winston Water Engineering

C-330Lamella Clarifier and Tube Settler

A stack of inclined plates turns one square metre of floor into ten or more square metres of settling area. The particle no longer has to fall the depth of the tank — only the gap between two plates.

Cutaway — Lamella Clarifier and Tube Settler

WaterSettling solidsClarifiedSludge

How it works

The idea — A particle in an open tank must fall the whole water depth to be captured. Fill the tank with inclined plates 50 mm apart and it only has to fall 50 mm. The settling distance collapses while the flow path stays long — that is the entire trick.
Projected area — What counts is not the plate area but its horizontal projection, plate area times cos θ. Sixty plates of 2 × 1.5 m at 55° give roughly 100 m² of settling area inside a tank whose floor is under 10 m². A tenfold area multiplier in the same civil works.
Sludge return — Solids land on the plate and slide back down against the upward flow. This only works above about 45°. Below that the sludge stalls, the passages blind over, and performance falls off a cliff — drag the angle down and watch the flag.
Laminar flow — The plate passages must stay laminar. Above roughly Re 500 the flow becomes unsteady, settled solids are re-entrained, and the extra area buys nothing. This is what limits how hard you can push a lamella pack.
What governs it — Overflow rate on the projected area is the sizing number, and it should be gentler than an open clarifier because the passages are short and unforgiving. Then check angle for sludge return and Reynolds for stability. Get all three or the pack blinds.
Inclined plates — Flat plates at 55 degrees, sludge sliding down against the rising water. Simple to fabricate, easy to hose down, and tolerant of grit. The clear spacing of about 50 mm is what limits how much settling area you can pack into a given volume.

Design parameters

The panel opposite runs the same correlations as the C-330 design sheet, so the animation and the calculator cannot disagree. Every parameter below is live — drag one and the picture responds.

Parameter	Unit	Default	Range
Configuration
Insert type		Inclined plate	3 options
Tube settlers hold the flow in a smaller hydraulic diameter, so they stay laminar at a higher loading than flat plates do.
Duty
Feed flow	m³/h	80	20 – 1,500
Influent SS	mg/L	120	20 – 1,500
Number of plates	off	60	10 – 200
Plate length	m	2	0.8 – 3.5
Plate width	m	1.5	0.5 – 4
Plate angle	°	55	35 – 70

Open the full C-330 design sheet for the other five inputs, all twenty-four results with their envelopes, the six equations printed beside the numbers they produce, and a calculation record you can export and put in a design file.

Live parameters

Six of the eleven inputs the C-330 design sheet takes.

Configuration

Insert type

Tube settlers hold the flow in a smaller hydraulic diameter, so they stay laminar at a higher loading than flat plates do.

Duty

Feed flow 80 m³/h

Influent SS 120 mg/L

Number of plates 60 off

Plate length 2 m

Plate width 1.5 m

Plate angle 55 °

You have an estimate. The design sheet is the justification.

This page sizes the unit on six variables and tells you whether the headline numbers land in range. That is enough to sketch with, and it stays free. What it will not do is survive a design review: it does not show you the equation behind any number, it checks the obvious limits rather than all of them, and there is nothing to file.

The C-330 design sheet runs the same physics on eleven inputs, reports twenty-four results against their envelopes, prints the six governing equations beside the numbers they produce, and exports the lot as a calculation record for the design file.