• Journal of Korean Society of Disaster and Security
• /
• v.9 no.2
• /
• pp.63-75
• /
• 2016

For safe water supply, residual chlorine has to be maintained in tap-water above a certain level from drinking water treatment plants to the final tap-water end-point. However, according to the current literature, approximately 30-60% of residual chlorine is being lost during the whole water supply pathways. The losses of residual chlorine may have been attributed to the current tendency for water supply managers to reduce chlorine dosage in drinking water treatment plants, aqueous phase decomposition of residual chlorine in supply pipes, accelerated chlorine decomposition at a high temperature during summer, leakage or losses of residual chlorine from old water supply pipes, and disappearances of residual chlorine in water storage tanks. Because of these, it is difficult to rule out the possibility that residual chlorine concentrations become lower than a regulatory level. In addition, it is concerned that the regulatory satisfaction of residual chlorine in water storage tanks can not always be guaranteed by using the current design method in which only storage capacity and/or hydraulic retention time are simply used as design factors, without considering other physico-chemical processes involved in chlorine disappearances in water storage tank. To circumvent the limitations of the current design method, mathematical models for aqueous chlorine decomposition, sorption of chlorine into wall surface, and mass-transfer into air-phase via evaporation were selected from literature, and residual chlorine reduction behavior in water storage tanks was numerically simulated. The model simulation revealed that the major factors influencing residual chlorine disappearances in water storage tanks are the water quality (organic pollutant concentration) of tap-water entering into a storage tank, the hydraulic dispersion developed by inflow of tap-water into a water storage tank, and sorption capacity onto the wall of a water storage tank. The findings from his work provide useful information in developing novel design and technology for minimizing residual chlorine disappearances in water storage tanks.