Design optimization of the porous baffle in a disinfection contact tank for high efficiency

ABSTRACT

Disinfection contact tanks facilitated in urban water treatment plants suffer from low hydraulic and mixing efficiencies, which may result in high chemical and energy usage to yield the required disinfection levels. Porous baffle design can effectively remedy the adverse effects of solid baffles by creating momentum exchange between neighbouring chambers with controllable porosity in the flow direction. Although previously developed baffle has been proved to enhance the efficiency of the contact system, porous baffle design has not yet been optimized. A simulation-optimization framework is developed by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations and employed for single and multi-objective optimization of the porosity. The optimized design of tripartite baffle improved hydraulic and mixing efficiencies by 50% and 56%, respectively. The integrated optimization framework developed in this study can effectively be used for the multi-objective optimization of porous baffle in the design of disinfection contact tanks.

KEYWORDS:

• Water disinfection
• contact tank
• CFD
• design optimization

Acknowledgements

The numerical calculations reported in this paper were fully performed at TUBITAK ULAKBIM, High Performance and Grid Computing Center (TRUBA resources).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed https://doi.org/10.1080/1573062X.2022.2086884

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBITAK) under Grant no. 217M472