Effects of environmental variables on the photo-Fenton plant design

• A kinetics model including environmental variables, T and UV radiation, is proposed.
• The fine tune of the model was successfully carried out in an outdoor pilot plant.
• The model allows scaling the plant on the basis of environmental conditions.
• The treatment capacity of a plant is predicted with the environmental conditions.

A model to track the dynamics of an outdoor photo-Fenton plant is proposed to design and scale up this kind of facility. This takes into account explicit variation in temperature and UV irradiation. The degradation of a paracetamol-contaminated wastewater was used to develop the model, first at lab scale and then at pilot plant scale in order to fine tune it. Provided with historical data on environmental conditions, an efficient design using the model is obtained with the QUV method, which is the normal procedure, computing the accumulated energy per volume unit needed to reach a particular mineralization level. The application of the model allows scaling the plant on the basis of yearly environmental conditions and predicting the treatment capacity of the plant as a function of these environmental conditions. Additionally, plant performance can be compared for different locations as a function of UV radiation and temperature conditions. For a given yearly treatment volume goal, when moving from the best conditions to the worst conditions, a plant size five times higher was needed, whilst the QUV needed to achieve the desired mineralization only increased three fold.

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