Modeling of hydrothermal oxidation in supercritical water oxidation with energy recovery

Abstract

The hydrothermal oxidation is an efficient and clean way for wastewater treatment; it is also an energy self sufficient process under certain conditions, by the mean of the highly exothermic reaction of oxidation. In this present work, we studied the modeling of hydrothermal oxidation of phenol polluted water in supercritical conditions. First we apply a simple mathematical model for tubular reactor, resulting from mass, momentum and energy balances, which is often difficult to solve in its general form. According to adequate simplifications, the profiles of temperature and concentration of chemical species are computed along the reactor; using finite differences with a developed Mathcad program which returns results close to those from experimental works from literature. A design of experiment method was also applied to quantify the influence of operation conditions on the treatment efficiency and on the recovery of the heat generated by the exothermic reaction.