The abundance of water as well as its unique physico-chemical properties make water an indispensable industrial asset. However, the overuse of water and the inevitable contamination resulting from it require. The development of methods of thorough cleaning before water can be recycled or returned to environment. Particularly important are treatments against microbial growth – exponentially growing microbial pathogens and other organisms can severely poison sources of drinkable water, or disrupt environments. For example, ballast water is often taken up on ships at certain locations. Afterwards discharged at destinations far away from the original locations. In such cases, the alien, non-indigenous organisms can prove to be a great threat to the environments. An efficient and proven method to decontaminate water from the microbial contaminants is to use ultraviolet (UV) light to destroy their DNA.

They’re widely used in treating (for instance) drinking water, wastewater, industrial process water and ballast water. However, different water processes involve a variety of operating conditions (pressures, temperatures, velocities) and they therefore sustain a diversity of organisms as well. In order to ensure that UV reactors provide sufficient decontamination rates. Their design and operating regimes must be properly calibrated and optimized. A particularly useful method for this is to model combined flow and UV fields in complex geometries by means of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD).