Coping With Water Pollution Via EnhancedAeration

Abstract

River and lake environments have been drastically deteriorated along with the economical and industrial developments of a country. The change of the human life style is also another important factor affecting on the pollution of water environments. One of the most effective and economical ways to protect, improve and purify the water environment should be aeration. An enhanced aeration system is proposed to cope with low effectivity, scale-up difficulty and restricted versatility accompanied with conventional aeration systems. The enhanced aeration system utilises the centrifugal shear stress to generate an enormous number of fine air bubbles. The pressure loss of the cyclone-like aerator is deduced from the experimental works and dimensional analysis, which serves to scale-up the aeration system and to evaluate the energy consumption of the system. The performance of the aeration system is experimentally evaluated in terms of the maximum aeration rate and the dissolved oxygen transfer rate. The former is confirmed to take above 0.5 and the latter is supported by the transfer theory indicating the higher mass transfer coefficient than those in conventional aeration systems.