TY - JOUR
T1 - Aeration pipe design for free bubbling hydrodynamic optimization of flat sheet MBRs
AU - Wang, Bing
AU - Zhang, Yan
AU - Fang, Yuan
AU - Zhang, Kaisong
AU - Field, Robert W.
N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by grants from the National Key R&D Program of China ( 2021YFC3201402 ), Ministry of Science and Technology; the Bureau of Frontier Sciences and Education ( QYZDB-SSW-DQC044 ); the Bureau of International Cooperation ( 132C35KYSB20160018 ); the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Joint Project between CAS-CSIRO ( 132C35KYSB20170051 ); FJIRSM & IUE Joint Research Fund (No. RHZX-2019-002 ); National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 52100047 ) and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities , Nankai University ( 0085 ). The authors would like to thank the grant of “ antifouling membranes and slug bubbling flat sheet membrane bioreactors for the next generation wastewater treatment ” and Oxiamembrane Co. Ltd for technical support. RWF acknowledges the support provided by an APEX project on water reuse that has been supported by the Royal Society in partnership with the British Academy and the Royal Academy of Engineering together with generous support from the Leverhulme Trust . The authors also thank Mr. Xingbiao Chen and Dr. Olusegun Abass for their help and industrial perspective.
PY - 2022/3/15
Y1 - 2022/3/15
N2 - An open-end aerator for free bubbling has been found previously for hydrodynamic effect enhancement. This study is focused, through two modifications, on its further optimization for aeration homogeneity in a commercial flat sheet membrane bioreactor (FSMBR). One relates to the aerators themselves, the other to the central aeration air supply pipe. The aerators are tapered, or to be more precise each one is a frustum i.e. that portion of cone which remains after the upper part has been cut off by a plane parallel to its base. A validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is constructed, hydrodynamic features were predicted for various implementations of the new design. An extensive study found that to achieve a very high degree of uniformity between different aerators for a full-scale FSMBR (160 sheets), the optimal design featured frustum-designed aerators of length 180 mm with the diameter decreasing from 18 to 9 mm at the open end. Each aerator had four top nozzles of diameter 4 mm, and 20 aerators were attached to a pipe of 1760 mm. Based upon this aerator design, the central aeration pipe diameter was optimized, the shear stress was enhanced and corresponding number of effective channel coverage was enhanced by 25–75%.
AB - An open-end aerator for free bubbling has been found previously for hydrodynamic effect enhancement. This study is focused, through two modifications, on its further optimization for aeration homogeneity in a commercial flat sheet membrane bioreactor (FSMBR). One relates to the aerators themselves, the other to the central aeration air supply pipe. The aerators are tapered, or to be more precise each one is a frustum i.e. that portion of cone which remains after the upper part has been cut off by a plane parallel to its base. A validated computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model is constructed, hydrodynamic features were predicted for various implementations of the new design. An extensive study found that to achieve a very high degree of uniformity between different aerators for a full-scale FSMBR (160 sheets), the optimal design featured frustum-designed aerators of length 180 mm with the diameter decreasing from 18 to 9 mm at the open end. Each aerator had four top nozzles of diameter 4 mm, and 20 aerators were attached to a pipe of 1760 mm. Based upon this aerator design, the central aeration pipe diameter was optimized, the shear stress was enhanced and corresponding number of effective channel coverage was enhanced by 25–75%.
KW - Aerator design
KW - CFD
KW - Flat sheet MBR
KW - Shear stress
KW - Velocity distribution
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85122503283&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1016/j.memsci.2021.120222
DO - 10.1016/j.memsci.2021.120222
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85122503283
SN - 0376-7388
VL - 646
JO - Journal of Membrane Science
JF - Journal of Membrane Science
M1 - 120222
ER -