Rapid Analysis of Disinfection Efficiency Through Computational Fluid Dynamics

Disinfection technologies are widely used in the water and wastewater treatment industry. A rapid evaluation of disinfection efficiency before facility construction would help engineers improve facility designs and consequently bring economic benefits to the water or wastewater treatment plant. With rapid advances in computing technologies, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) has become affordable and popular. In this study, CFD (instead of physical experiments) was used to inform a reduced-order, segregated-flow model (SFM) of chemical reactions and inactivation, serving to provide a rapid evaluation of disinfection efficiency. The CFD-SFM model was validated with the use of physical experimental data (i.e., effluent ozone and bromate concentration) and log inactivation from a column contactor and a baffled contactor. The effluent chemical concentrations and microorganism inactivation predicted by the proposed hybrid modeling approach are consistent with the experimental data, thereby demonstrating that the hybrid CFD-SFM is viable for evaluating water disinfection efficiency.