Modeling of cavitation as an advanced wastewater treatment

"This paper presents a theoretical study of cavitation as an advanced oxidation process. A. mathematical algorithm, which couples single bubble dynamics and chemical reactions for a. cavitating bubble, is proposed and compared with experimental and theoretical works. reported in the literature. The main output variable, used for comparison, is the hydroxyl. radical production. A wide range of parameter values is evaluated for the analysis of hydro-. dynamic cavitation in an orifice. Thanks to the large number of simulation, it was possible to. find a very good agreement with a design correlation proposed in the literature. Addition-. ally, a novel approach has been proposed, which consists of integrating the estimated radical. production over a typical bubble size distribution in order to predict a global oxidant pro-. duction. Moreover, by fixing the values of flowrate, pressure, and geometric parameters, a. real experimental condition of hydrodynamic cavitation in a Venturi device has been simu-. lated. This allowed the comparison of simulation results with the experimental ones reported. in the literature. A good agreement has been found in terms of cavitational yield, an estima-. tion of the process efficiency from an energetic perspective."