Student Collaboration Provides New Insights Into High-quality Drinking Water at Lower Cost
upstart writes:
Student collaboration provides new insights into high-quality drinking water at lower cost:
Extensive purification is required to produce reliable and tasty drinking water. Purification consists of a series of processes, and water softening is an important step in water treatment. Currently, most water softening processes use a specific type of softening reactor, known as liquid-solid fluidised (LSF) bed reactors. It is estimated that millions of cubic meters of water per year are softened using this approach.
The recent study, published in the journal Chemical Engineering Science: X, used state-of-the-art computer simulations as well as experimental data to examine the fluid dynamics within these softening reactors.
Traditionally, it has been thought that these reactors show homogeneous behavior, where grains within the reactor are uniformly dispersed throughout the fluid without observable gaps.
However, the research team, which included researchers from Eindhoven University, Delft University, Queen Mary, Utrecht University of Applied Sciences and water cycle company Waternet, found that these softening reactor granular beds instead had a heterogeneous structure with local voids and instabilities.
It is expected that these findings will enable the optimisation and improvement of current drinking water softening processes, as the observed heterogeneity affects crystallization and chemical reactions associated with the softening process in unexpected ways. In turn, this could lead to the production of high quality softened drinking water at a lower cost, and with reduced CO2 emissions.
[...] [Students Jamila Rahman and Phoebe Berhanu, co-authors on the paper, said] "This research explicitly shows that heterogenous mixing is the usual case, not homogeneous. This will open up for more productive calculations for quantity and tailored processes for industrial use, meaning it will be both cost effective and lead to less potential waste."
Journal Reference:
Experimental and numerical insights into heterogeneous liquid-solid behaviour in drinking water softening reactors [open], Chemical Engineering Science: X (DOI: 10.1016/j.cesx.2021.100100)
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