Let’s deliver cleaner water together

"Supercritical" in this case is referring to a specific type of fluid hydraulics where the liquid is triggered to be in a very thin and very fast flow state.

A good example of supercritical flow is seen on the spillway of a dam where a thin depth of water shoots down the face of the spillway at a high velocity.

The name Supercritical UV™ comes from the patented concept of applying ultraviolet light to a supercritical flow. As seen below unlike other ultraviolet systems where the lamps are submerged in the liquid, the ultraviolet lamps in a Supercritical UV™ system are suspended above the flow.

• Start/stop signal – used to prestart the SCUV™ system before the pump starts allowing for lamp warmup
• Inlet flow rate
• Lamp hours
• Treated flow rate
• Customer specific warnings and errors
• Filter pressures and cleaning required

The SCUV™ system can monitor a vast number of variables, please enquire further if the metric you require is not listed above.

The SCUV™ system is designed with operators in mind to make cleaning and regular maintenance as easy as possible.

Each individual module can be isolated independently from the system by deactivating the module using the PLC. Deactivating the module will close the valve to the module, activate the clean water purge (when supplied) and turn the UV lamps off.

The module can then be quickly and easily slid out of the rack and the lid opened, allowing access to both the treatment channel and the lamps above.

Sliding out and opening a module can be done in seconds and requires no flow disconnection meaning no dripping and no mess. While individual module maintenance is carried out all remaining SCUV™ modules in the system remain operational.

The SCUV™ system has previously achieved a 4.7 log removal average of enterococci on an industrial liquid with TSS ranging from 100 to over 500 mg/L (average of 368 mg/L and median of 275 mg/L).

However, this level of treatment cannot be assumed to be possible in any liquid because the nature of different solids varies significantly affecting the treatment in a number of ways. For example some solids may shield pathogenic bacteria deep inside their structure while other will limit the bacteria to their surface.

This means that disinfection of the same concentration of one type of solid may perform completely different to another type. It is even possible that a liquid with a higher TSS of one type of solid may be easier to treat than a lower concentration of another.

Algae can have a profound effect on the light penetration through a liquid resulting in a low UVT.

The SCUV™ system counteracts the effects of algae by operating with a liquid depth of just a few millimetres, meaning that there is less distance that the ultraviolet light must pass through before it hits a pathogen.

The SCUV™ system has demonstrated treatment of E.coli to over 3 log removal despite the pond effluent having over 200 mg/L of what were predominantly algal solids along with a UVT below 5%.

The amount of time spent on cleaning and maintaining a Supercritical UV™ disinfection system will depend a lot on site conditions. Independent engineering consultants speaking with clients who use the Supercritical UV™ disinfection system state that at industrial facilities, which are generally the more challenging sites, maintenance and cleaning works out at around 10 minutes per module per week.

The SCUV™ system is engineered to produce a thin, fast liquid flow of just a few mm in depth that shoots down a channel while being irradiated by ultraviolet lamps suspended above.

This thin liquid film is produced by passing the liquid through a slot. Any particles that may block or blind this slot need to be screened out prior to the liquid entering the SCUV™ system.

This is typically achieved by using a basket screen (1000 micron/1mm) immediately prior to the SCUV™ system.

The efficiency of ultraviolet light is directly linked to the temperature the lamps operate at. A small departure from the optimum range can massively impact the amount of useful ultraviolet light that is being outputted from the lamp.

The temperature of traditional submerged lamp ultraviolet systems is dictated by the temperature of the fluid passing over the quartz sleeve the lamp is housed in.

These systems may have a high temperature alarm but typically don’t have any active temperature regulation. Lamps in the SCUV™ system are located above the flow in compartment encased behind a quartz window where the temperature can be optimised by fans.

Sensors actively monitor the temperature and ramp up or down the cooling fans, keeping the lamps in the optimum window and maximizing UV-C output.

Eventually all ultraviolet lamps need replacing. Most traditional systems have an array of lamps (in quartz sleeves) submerged in the liquid, either within closed vessels or in an open channel.

Occasionally a lamp will fail before its useful lifetime is complete. If a lamp fails and needs replacing, the liquid that passed near that lamp will receive a lower dose of light.

By contrast, in NovoLabs™ multi-module systems the liquid flows through the modules in parallel. If a lamp outage occurs it is immediately sensed and the flow to that module can be automatically diverted to another available module ensuring continuous treatment.

While the status of the ultraviolet lamps is clearly displayed on the PLC and via LED indicators on each module, accidental ultraviolet exposure is a safety hazard.

For this reason, SCUV™ modules each have multiple cut-out safety switches that will immediately deactivate the ultraviolet lamps for that specific module if they detect a module being opened or slid out from the rack.

For the same flowrate, reducing the depth means the liquid velocity proportionally increases and therefore yes the residence time is decreased.

The residence time in the SCUV™ system is very short – less than a second. The loss in treatment performance due to residence time is linear.