Response of a Tropical Reservoir to Bubbler Destratification
Publication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 132, Issue 7
Abstract
A one-dimensional reservoir-bubbler model has been developed to examine the mixing and the change in dissolved oxygen pattern induced by bubbler operation in a stratified reservoir. The reservoir-bubbler model is applied to a tropical reservoir, the Upper Peirce Reservoir, Singapore. For this tropical reservoir with low wind speeds, it is found that bubbler operation dominates oxygen transfer into the reservoir water rather than oxygen transfer from all other sources, including surface reaeration. It is illustrated that selection of airflow rate per diffuser, air bubble radius, and total number of diffusers are important criteria in bubbler designs. Higher dissolved oxygen levels in reservoirs are obtained by increasing the bubbler airflow rate that is associated with lower mechanical efficiency than optimal of the bubbler. Determining an appropriate airflow rate is shown to be a tradeoff between increased dissolved oxygen levels and increased operating costs as airflow rate increases. When the reservoir is close to well mixed, the water quality is usually reasonably good but the bubbler operates at a very low —thus the bubbler should be turned off.
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Acknowledgments
The France Government Scholarship awarded to the first writer is gratefully acknowledged. The writers gratefully acknowledge the three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions to improve quality of the paper.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 132 • Issue 7 • July 2006
Pages: 736 - 746
Copyright
© 2006 ASCE.
History
Received: May 24, 2004
Accepted: Oct 25, 2005
Published online: Jul 1, 2006
Published in print: Jul 2006
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