The investigation and simulation of the UVOM ballast water treatment device

Abstract

The marine environments are threatened by discharged wastewater from ships, especially ballast water. In this study, a novel ballast water treatment device (UVOM) was designed and operated for ballast water treatment. The main process of UVOM consists of membrane filter, venture tubes, the UV catalytic TiO2 unit and an ozone generator. Salinity, flow rate and UV intensity was investigated for their efforts on process efficiency. Results indicated that salinity cause less effects on the removal efficiency of UVOM, and flow rate and UV intensity played more important roles. For UV intensity of 50 W and the flow rate no more than 200 L/h, and UV intensity of 75 W and the flow rate no more than 400 L/h, the discharged ballast water can meet the D-2 standard. Back propagation neural network (BPNN) was constructed for simulating the process performance, and it can better describe the process with less deviation between predictive values and real values. The deviation of the total bacteria was from 4.14% to 6.16%, and the deviation of E. coli was from 3.6% to 7.2%. In addition, the results showed that the relative importance of flow rate (65.96%) was significantly larger than UV intensity (34.04%).