ABSTRACT

Assessments such as proposed herein could involve a hydrodynamicist and a treatment process specialist, with perhaps a health professional, an economist, a limnologist, a manager of water or effluent treatment plant, a regulator and a civil engineer. Due to inadequate design procedures water treatment plant operators tend to use higher disinfectant dosages than theoretically necessary to achieve a given disinfection efficiency level. Several examples, in a range of environmental sanitation areas, can be used to demonstrate the importance of the hydrodynamics of reactors for the optimisation of water and wastewater treatment processes. Research undertaken in the 1950s in the area of chemical reaction engineering were scientific precursors of hydrodynamic-kinetic models for continuous flow reactors, whereby the process efficiency of a unit and a hydrodynamic parameter associated with the flow pattern in the unit are explicitly related in analytical form.