Mathematical Modelling of Electrophysical Water Treatment

Abstract

The problem of mathematical modeling the processes of water treatment from charged particles by electric field is considered. The problem is relevant due to the mass use of cleaning technologies in industry, medicine or the national economy. At the present stage, a significant improvement of purification system quality and the introduction of the technologies for the regeneration of their filtration components are required. Mathematical simulation using computer and supercomputer calculations helps to accelerate the development of new devices and cleaning technologies. On the basis of the chosen purification technology, it is important to create a numerical simulation apparatus with a controlled high accuracy of the calculations. For this purpose, we use a quasi-hydrodynamic (QHD) model of a viscous incompressible fluid flow, a system of convection-diffusion equations taking into account the action of the Lorentz force to describe the propagation of harmful impurities in aqueous medium, and an equation for the electric field potential [1, 2]. The numerical algorithm is based on the finite volume method. It is applied in the case of irregular unstructured meshes. This is important for problems of real two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) geometry. Time integration is performed according to an explicit scheme, which simplifies the procedure for parallelizing the algorithm. The proposed approach was tested on the examples of 2D and 3D geometry with various locations of the electrodes and various values of the potentials. The obtained results of the concentration of the ionic impurities show the possibility of this method to purify water from 10 to 40 percent. A design of a water purifier based on electrophysical purification technology can be developed on the base of this study.