Design characteristics of showering aeration system

Abstract

The showering aeration system (SAS) was designed and its performance was evaluated by conducting the aeration experiments in a tank of dimension 2 × 4 × 1.5 m. Initially, the aeration experiments were conducted to optimize the radius of curvature (r) of the SAS with different values, such as r = 0, 5, 10, 15, and 20 mm, and maintain other geometric parameters, i.e. number of holes in the shower (n); height of water fall (H); diameter of the shower hole (d); volume of water under aeration (V) and water flow rate (Q) as constants. The optimum radius of curvature (r) was found to be 10 mm. The aeration experiments were further conducted with four different non-dimensional geometric parameters such as the number of holes (n), the ratio of the height of water fall to the length of shower arm (H/l); the ratio of the diameter of the hole to the length of shower arm (d/l) and the ratio of the volume of water to the cube of the length of shower arm (V/l3): The Response Surface Methodology and Box-Behnken Design were used to optimize the non-dimensional geometric parameters of the SAS to maximize the Non-Dimensional Standard Aeration Efficiency. The result indicates that the maximum NDSAE of 16.98 × 106 was obtained from the SAS performance at n = 80; H/l = 2; d/l = 4 and V=l3 = 48.