Enhancement of Ultraviolet Disinfection of Wastewater by High Pressure Water Jet Pretreatment: Preliminary Results and a New Approach

Abstract

The shield or shadow effect of large particles on bacteria undergoing irradiation from ultraviolet light in effluent of treated wastewater would greatly reduce the effectiveness of ultraviolet disinfection. The objective of this work is to evaluate the newly proposed method of applying a high pressure water jet (HPWJ) as a pretreatment step in combination with ultraviolet irradiation to improve the disinfection efficiency of wastewater by breaking up the large particles (reducing the shield or shadow effects). Pretreatment experiments with two HPWJ units having different water pressure output (6.9 and 13.1 MPa) and nozzles were conducted in the study on primary clarifier overflow (PCO). The experiment results revealed that the particle size distributions (PSDs) in the test samples were apparently shifted toward the small size range and the total number of particles has been greatly increased after undergoing treatment with the HPWJ. In general it is assumed that bioparticles larger than a certain size