Shock-wave behaviour of sedimentation in wastewater treatment: a rich problem

Summary, in English

A common industrial process for separating particles from a liquid is continuous sedimentation, which is used in the chemical, mining, pulp-and-paper and food industries. It can also be found in most wastewater treatment plants, where it is a crucial subprocess of a complex biological system. The process has provided, and will continue to provide, scientific problems that lead to fundamental research in different disciplines such as mathematics, wastewater, chemical, mineral, control and automation engineering. A selective survey of previous results within the field of pure and applied mathematics is presented with focus on a nonlinear convection-diffusion partial differential equation with discontinuous coefficients. In a model of a wastewater treatment plant, such an equation is coupled to a set of ordinary differential equations. Some new results on the steady-state solutions of such a coupled system are also presented.

• Author: Stefan Diehl
• Editor: Kalle Åström; Lars-Erik Persson; Sergei Silvestrov
• Department/s: Mathematics (Faculty of Engineering); Partial differential equations; Numerical Analysis
• Publishing year: 2012
• Language: English
• Pages: 175-214
• Publication/Series: Springer Proceedings in Mathematics
• Volume: 6
• Links: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-20236-0_7
• Document type: Conference paper
• Publisher: Springer
• Topic: Mathematics; Computational Mathematics; Chemical Engineering; Water Engineering; Water Treatment
• Conference name: Tribute Workshop in Honour of Gunnar Sparr held in Lund, May 8-9, 2008
• Conference date: 2008-05-08 - 2008-05-09
• Conference place: Centre for Mathematical Sciences, Lund, Sweden
• Status: Published
• Research group: Partial differential equations; Numerical Analysis
• ISBN/ISSN/Other: ISSN: 2190-5614; ISSN: 2190-5622; ISBN: 978-3-642-20235-3 (print); ISBN: 978-3-642-20236-0 (online)