Pauline Talbot

A comprehensive analysis of the evaporation of a liquid spherical drop.

In this paper, a new comprehensive analysis of a suspended drop of a pure liquid evaporating into air is presented. Based on mass and energy conservation equations, a quasi-steady model is developed including diffusive and convective transports, and considering the non-isothermia of the gas phase. The main original feature of this simple analytical model lies in the consideration of the local dependence of the physico-chemical properties of the gas on the gas temperature, which has a significant influence on the evaporation process at high temperatures. The influence of the atmospheric conditions on the interfacial evaporation flux, molar fraction and temperature is investigated. Simplified versions of the model are developed to highlight the key mechanisms governing the evaporation process. For the conditions considered in this work, the convective transport appears to be opposed to the evaporation process leading to a decrease of the evaporation flux. However, this effect is relatively limited, the Péclet numbers happening to be small. In addition, the gas isothermia assumption never appears to be valid here, even at room temperature, due to the large temperature gradient that develops in the gas phase. These two conclusions are explained by the fact that heat transfer from the gas to the liquid appears to be the step limiting the evaporation process. Regardless of the complexity of the developed model, yet excluding extremely small droplets, the square of the drop radius decreases linearly over time (R(2) law). The assumptions of the model are rigorously discussed and general criteria are established, independently of the liquid-gas couple considered.

Ozone inactivation of resistant microorganisms: Laboratory analysis and evaluation of the efficiency of plants

In this work, the ozone inactivation of resistant microorganisms is studied and a method to assess the efficiency of a drinking water plant to inactivate resistant microorganisms using ozone is proposed. This method aims at computing the fraction of resistant microorganisms that are not inactivated at the exit of an ozonation step by evaluating the duration of the lag phase of the ozone inactivation of these microorganisms and the contact time distribution of these microorganisms with the ozone in the step. To evaluate the duration of the lag phase of the ozone inactivation of resistant pathogenic microorganisms, an experimental procedure is proposed and applied to Bacillus subtilis spores. The procedure aims at characterizing the ozone inactivation kinetics of B. subtilis spores for different temperature and ozone concentration conditions. From experimental data, a model of the ozone inactivation of B. subtilis spores is built. One of the parameters of this model is called the lag time and it measures the duration of the lag phase of the ozone inactivation of B. subtilis spores. This lag time is identified for different temperature and ozone concentration conditions in order to establish a correlation between this lag time and the temperature and ozone concentration conditions. To evaluate the contact time distribution between microorganisms and the ozone in a disinfection step of a drinking water plant, a computational fluid dynamics tool is used. The proposed method is applied to the ozonation channel of an existing drinking water plant located in Belgium and operated by Vivaqua. Results show that lag times and contact times are both in the same order of magnitude of a few minutes. For a large range of temperatures and ozone concentrations in the Tailfer ozonation channel and for the highest hydraulic flow rate applied, a significant fraction of resistant microorganisms similar to B. subtilis spores is not inactivated.