Ozone Generation For Swimming Pool Disinfection
Ozone has been used in swimming pools and spas in European countries since the early 1950s and in the United States since about 1975. In India, the use of ozone has grown rapidly over the last decade. Numerous private, public and commercial pools have switched to ozone technology as people have become more concerned about chlorine and chlorinated byproducts.
Chlorine is a good sanitizer and oxidizer, but these processes create unpleasant and unhealthy by-products. When chlorine oxidizes organic contaminants (body wastes, soaps, cosmetics, etc) carcinogenic chlorinated organics (THMs) are produced in abundance.
Chlorination of nitrogenous body wastes result in chloramines which cause an unpleasant smell and are the source of stinging eyes, ear and skin irritation. Despite these studies, most swimming pool ozone managers are probably unaware that they are exposing their patrons to THMs.This problem is not widely known and for the most part is ignored by the media.
Ozone prevents the formation of scum line forming and filter clogging chlorinated organics, eye & skin irritating and hair and swimsuit discoloring chloramines. Upon completion of these signficant oxidation tasks, ozone reverts to oxygen, leaving no by-products behind.
To date, Ozonation is the best water treatment solution available, yielding the most modern, safest and most environmentally friendly sanitation of pools and SPAs. However, not all ozone generation techniques will achieve the above benefits in a swimming pool.
There are two basic methods for ozone generators; corona discharge (CD) method and ultraviolet radiation (UV) method. In practice, ozone is generated by passing an oxygen containing gas through either a high energy electrical field or a high energy radiation source, the former being corona discharge and the latter UV radiation.
Only a portion of the oxygen is converted to ozone by these production techniques. With corona discharge an ozone concentration of up to 13% by weight is obtainable, however when generated by UV radiation a concentration of only 0.001 – 0.1% by weight is obtainable.
As expected, the solubility of ozone increases with an increase in ozone concentration in the gas stream. According to Henry’s Law, the efficiency of absorbing a specfic gas into an aqueous phase is based on the partial pressure of that particular gas in the total gas flow.
Therefore, the higher the concentration of ozone in the generator gas stream, the more complete will be the transfer of ozone into the water treatment. For UV generated systems, the ozone solubility is nearly nil. Hence, for ozone treatment of swimming pools, CD generated ozone will provide a water quality that is not achievable with UV generated ozone.
From a scientific and regulatory perspective water disinfection is routinely characterized on the basis of contact time as ascertained by Chicks law. Contact time and its kinetics are simply a measure of the inactivation expressed as a function of concentration of the disinfectant and time (as C*t, C is residual concentration, and t, time).
As expressed earlier, the concentration of ozone through UV generation method is 1/20 that of CD generation method. In addition to this, most UV lamps used for disinfection purposes operate in the 254 nm range. The ozone produced in the process gets decomposed by UV radiation to form hydroxyl radicals.
The half-life of hydroxyl free radicals is on the order of microseconds and have very little time to complete disinfection ozone action which typically require longer contact times. As a result hydroxyl radicals have oxidizing properties, but no disinfection property.