Computational fluid dynamics applied to water and wastewater treatment facility modeling

The major issues in water and wastewater industry are to meet quality requirements, to guarantee treatment process efficiency, to contain investment and operating costs. This implies the use of powerful predictive modeling and simulation tools which are able to account for the multiple interaction between all the water quality and process design parameters. Computational Fluid Dynamics modeling tools have already been widely used in other industries but their application in water industry is quite recent. This paper presents different applications of CFD modeling to the study of the hydro-dynamic and mass transfer performance of single- or two-phase flow reactors used in water and wastewater treatment. Numerical simulations, together with experimental measurements, have been performed on laboratory and full-scale plants in order to gain a better under-standing of the physical phenomena (mixing, interfacial transfer) occurring in these systems. Numerical simulations are systematically validated by experiments. The paper shows how CFD can be helpful in order to improve the design of existing water treatment plants and the process efficiency. In this scope, CFD enables designs more reliable and cost effective water treatment processes which remain basic environmental policy issues.