Mehrab Mehrvar

By Masroor Mohajerani, Mehrab Mehrvar and Farhad Ein-Mozaffari

Part of the book: Applied Computational Fluid Dynamics

By Ciro Bustillo-Lecompte and Mehrab Mehrvar

The meat processing industry is one of the largest consumers of total freshwater used in the agricultural and livestock industry worldwide. Meat processing plants (MPPs) produce large amounts of slaughterhouse wastewater (SWW) because of the slaughtering process and cleaning of facilities. SWWs need significant treatment for a sustainable and safe discharge to the environment due to the high content of organics and nutrients. Therefore, the treatment and final disposal of SWW are a public health necessity. In this chapter, the regulatory frameworks relevant to the SWW management, environmental impacts, health effects, and treatment methods are discussed. Although physical, chemical, and biological treatment can be used for SWW degradation, each treatment process has different advantages and drawbacks depending on the SWW characteristics, best available technology, jurisdictions, and regulations. SWWs are typically assessed using bulk parameters because of the various pollutant loads derived from the type and the number of animals slaughtered that fluctuate amid the meat industry. Thus, an on-site treatment using combined processes would be the best option to treat and disinfect the slaughterhouse effluents to be safely discharged into receiving waters.

Part of the book: Physico-Chemical Wastewater Treatment and Resource Recovery

By Dina Hamad, Mehrab Mehrvar and Ramdhane Dhib

Synthetic water-soluble polymers, well-known refractory pollutants, are abundant in wastewater effluents since they are extensively used in industry in a wide range of applications. These polymers can be effectively degraded by advanced oxidation processes (AOPs). This entry thoroughly covers the development of the photochemical kinetic model of the polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) degradation in UV/H2O2 advanced oxidation batch process that describes the disintegration of the polymer chains in which the statistical moment approach is considered. The reaction mechanism used to describe the photo-degradation of polymers comprises photolysis, polymer chain scission, and mineralization reactions. The impact of operating conditions on the process performance is evaluated. Characterization of the polymer average molecular weights, total organic carbon, and hydrogen peroxide concentrations as essential factors in developing a reliable photochemical model of the UV/H2O2 process is discussed. The statistical moment approach is applied to model the molar population balance of live and dead polymer chains taking into account the probabilistic chain scissions of the polymer. The photochemical kinetic model provides a comprehensive understanding of the impact of the design and operational variables.

Part of the book: Kinetic Modeling for Environmental Systems