Water Environment Research, Volume 78, Number 9, September 2006.The efficacy of disinfection processes in water purification systems is governed by several key factors, including reactor hydraulics, disinfectant chemistry, and microbial inactivation kinetics. The objective of this work was to develop a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model
to predict velocity fields, mass transport, chlorine decay, and microbial inactivation in a continuous flow reactor. The CFD model was also used to evaluate disinfection efficiency in alternative reactor designs. The CFD reactor analysis demonstrates that disinfection efficiency is affected by both kinetics and mixing state (i.e. , degree of micromixing or segregation).
Residence time distributions (RTDs) derived from tracer analysis do not describe intrinsic mixing conditions.
