Similitude in an Open-Channel UV Wastewater Disinfection Reactor
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 141, Issue 3
Abstract
The possibility of using a small-scale model to predict the performance of a full-size open-channel ultraviolet (UV) wastewater disinfection reactor was numerically investigated using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model. The CFD model consists of the volume of fluid (VOF) method for capturing the water–air interface, realizable model for turbulence, discrete ordinate (DO) model for resolving the UV intensity field in the reactor, and Lagrangian particle tracking for calculating the microbial particle trajectory. To ensure the similarity of the hydrodynamics between the full-size and two scaled-down open-channel reactors, the Froude and Reynolds numbers were considered. Scaling methodology for the UV radiation field was formulated to ensure that the same disinfection performance can be achieved between the full-size and the scaled-down reactors. The disinfection characteristics of the full-size and scaled-down reactors predicted by the CFD model were comparable suggesting that the open-channel reactor is scalable and the behavior of a large-scale reactor can be predicted from the results of a small-scale reactor.
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Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge the financial help of NSERC, Canada and Trojan Technologies for providing the reactor model and the experimental data.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 141 • Issue 3 • March 2015
Copyright
© 2014 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Dec 13, 2013
Accepted: Aug 15, 2014
Published online: Sep 19, 2014
Discussion open until: Feb 19, 2015
Published in print: Mar 1, 2015
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