PII: S0043-1354(99)00224-9

Wat. Res. Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 817824, 2000

# 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved
Printed in Great Britain
0043-1354/00/$ - see front matter

www.elsevier.com/locate/watres

A DEMONSTRATION SCALING-UP OF THE DISSOLVED

AIR FLOTATION
YONG CHUNG*M, YOON CHAN CHOIM, YOON HO CHOI and HYUNG
SEOK KANG
Institute for Environmental Research, Yonsei University, 134 Shin-Chon Dong, Seo-Dae-Mun Ku,
Seoul 120-752, South Korea
(First received 1 May 1998; accepted in revised form 1 May 1999)
AbstractDissolved air otation (DAF) is currently being received in much attention as an eective
process for solidliquid separation in water technology. In this study, we scaled-up the DAF plant
from a pilot-scale (72 m3/day) to a full-scale (6000 m3/day) plant and the sand-oat type DAF was
used. The concept of maintaining equal surface loading rate into scaling-up of DAF was a proper
practice and strategy. In order to optimize the DAF plant, it was needed to determine the surface
loading rate and air dissolving tube pressure. The optimum conditions of surface loading rate and air
dissolving tube pressure were indicated in 7.5 m3/m2 day and 440 kPa from the pilot plant, respectively.
The removal eciency for TOC and UV254 from the full-scale plant was as satisfactory as those from
the pilot plant for the same surface loading rates. However, especially in otation zone, the full-scale
plant performed a little bit poorer than the pilot-scale plant in turbidity and chlorophyll-a reduction:
because full-scale plant had long retention time and turbulent mixing condition during backwashing
time which might be brought about the breakage of fragile ocs.
Performance comparisons between the full-scale DAF plant and the conventional plant located at the
city of Nam-Yang Ju in Korea are presented. DAF process showed higher eciency than the
conventional settling system improving the water quality in general, namely, turbidity, TOC, UV254, Fe
and Mn. We, therefore, conclude that DAF system should have substantial advantages over the
conventional settling process in drinking water treatment. # 2000 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights
reserved
Key wordsdrinking water treatment, dissolved air otation, scale-up, full-scale plant

NOMENCLATURE

g
L
r
SL
T
v
V
Q
r
m

ticed since the method is most versatile (George,

1996). Air otation can be carried out in one of
two ways:

gravity
length dimension
ratio of model to prototype
surface loading rate (vol. ow rate/area time)
retention time
ow velocity
volume
ow rate
uid density
dynamic viscosity of uid

1. Air is bubbled through the liquid containing suspended matter to oat the matter to the surface.
From there, the matter is skimmed and removed.
2. The liquid is rst saturated with compressed air
to dissolve the air into the liquid at high pressure
in a saturation tank. Then the liquid containing
dissolved air is released into a otation tank at a
lower pressure, generating micro-bubbles (10
80 mm in diameter) that rise gently through the
liquid and carry the suspended matter to the surface. The matter is then skimmed from the surface and removed.

INTRODUCTION

There are three methods widely used for separating

suspended solids from a liquid. They are (1) gravity
separation(sedimentation), (2) ltration of small
suspended solids and (3) air otation. Among the
three methods, air otation is the most widely prac*Author to whom all correspondence should be addressed.
Fax: +822-392-0239; e-mail: ierychung@yumc.ac.kr
817

The latter technology is called dissolved air otation (DAF) and is eective in separating very
small suspended particles that can not be separated
by ordinary air otation and sedimentation
(Edzwald and Walsh, 1992; Edzwald, 1993).
It has been reported that DAF is an eective
alternative process to conventional sedimentation in

818

Yong Chung et al.

water containing low-density particles such as phytoplankton (Janssen, 1991; Edzwald and Walsh,
1992). Malley and Edzwald (1991) reported that
DAF produced signicantly lower residual turbidity
than conventional gravity sedimentation did, particularly at lower temperature.
Location of the full-scale DAF plant
Wha Do Water Treatment Plant in Nam-Yang
Ju has provided conventional water treatment process for over 20 years. The main source of water
comes from Northern Han River, which ows from
the northeast inland to the west seashore of the
Korean peninsula. The water qualities vary from
season to season. Sometimes, it is prone to bring
about algal blooms and ash turbidity spikes
exceeding 100 NTU in heavy rainy seasons. The
conventional treatment process has unchanged from
the original design: coagulation, sedimentation,
slow-speed sand ltration and chlorination.
The conventional plant has historically performed
quite adequately. However, more recently, trends
have shown deterioration in the raw water quality
and manifested itself in a gradual increase in nonpoint sources. The number of cafes and restaurants
were a few hundreds in the 1980's, while the numbers have increased enormously during recent years;
nowadays 3670, and golf links under construction
are 15 at the vicinity of northern Han river. A survey shows that BOD of raw water was 1 ppm in
1990, 1.1 ppm during 19911992 and 1.4 ppm in
1996. People suspect that the increase in BOD levels
is related with those factors described above.
It was proved that the conventional plant has a
limitation in improving the performance, so the
DAF was adopted as the best process for updating
treated water quality and solving construction costs.
Scale-up strategy
Some laws of similitude for designing water treatment plants are shown in Table 1. Reynolds number criterion and Froude number criterion can be
derived from the uid dynamic similarity (Yu and
Lo, 1992). The others are based on model and prototype having the same values of design parameters.
Hart and Gupta (1978) discussed the rational guidelines for designing studies to improve an existing
water and wastewater treatment unit conguration
through the use of experimental analysis of a smallscale model. They found that the law of equal
hydraulic retention time could get the best hydraulic

similarity from the tracer data results for a prototype and model chlorine contact unit.
When considering the proper design and operation for a full-scale plant, sucient engineering of
a conceptual nature has to be performed on a pilotscale plant in order to establish the parameters.
However, it was important that the piloting conditions reected those in the full-scale plant, all of
the laws would not be used for scale-up strategy.
The success of a full-scale plant performance
depends heavily on the optimum design of the fullscale plant. Also, it is very important to seek optimum operating conditions. In this study, we tried
to assess the full-scale DAF performance by comparing treated water quality to the results of the
pilot-scale plant. If the treated water qualities
would dier from each other, it would be regarded
as having some failures in the scale-up.
This article:
1. sets up a scale-up strategy for the designing of
full-scale DAF plant;
2. investigates the performance of water treatment
and obtains optimum operating conditions for
the pilot plant DAF; and
3. compares water treatment results between the
full-scale DAF and the conventional plant.

Water treatment procedure and plant compartments:

pilot-scale DAF
The schematic diagram of DAF plant is described
in Fig. 1. The raw water enters into the rapid mixing tank and is mixed with the coagulant. Then the
water ows through a two-stage occulator, gradually building up the ocks by gentle mixing during
the passage through the occulator.
The DAF otation tank had one vertical side,
which was constructed of clear acrylic to allow
visual observation of the otation process. And the
tank had three compartments of sludge discharging
pipe, inner tank and otation zone. The occulated
water owed from the bottom of the last occulation stage to the inlet distributor through a hydraulic rotary joint by jet injection.
At the outlet of the distributor, pressurized water
with the dissolved air is added. At the air a pressure
pump to ADT recycles dissolved tube (ADT), a
small volume of the water is pre-claried by dissolved air otation where compressed air is added
from a compressor. Air is dissolved under pressure

Table 1. Laws of similitude for scale-up

Law of simility
Reynolds similarity
Froude similarity
Equal hydraulic retention time
Equal over-ow rate

Equation used

Qr f Lr

Remarks

Vr Lr rr =mr 1
Vr = gr Lr 1=2 1
Tr Vr =Qr 1
Vr 1

Qr L r
Qr Lr 2:5
Qr Lr 3
Qr Lr 2

mr =rr 1
gr 1

Practical scale-up of DAF system

819

Fig. 1. Schematic diagram of the full-scale DAF plant located in city of Nam-Yang Ju.

in the water and mixed with the occulated raw

water at the outlet of the distributor.
The ocks and suspended solids oat to the surface. The oating scum or sludge accumulated on
the water surface is scooped o by a sludge discharging spiral scoop and discharged into the center
sludge collector, where there is a sludge outlet to an
appropriate sludge treatment facility. The otation
tanks euent ows to sand lters and is discharged
to a chlorinating tank.
Dierent parts of the full-scale plant in comparison
to the pilot-scale DAF
The full-scale plant diers from the pilot plant in
sand ltration and backwashing method. The bottom of the otation tank is composed of multiple
sections of sand lter beds with individual clear
wells. The outlets from the individual clear wells
Table 2. Operation conditions and specications for the pilot and
full-scale DAF
Parameter
Flow rate ( m3/h)
Flotation tank capacity (m3)
Flocculation tank capacity (m3)
Flocculation time (min)
Impellor speed (rpm):
Tank 1
Tank 2
Tank 3
ADT volume (l)
Retention time at ADT (s)
ADT type
ADT pressure (kPa)
Sand lter surface area (m2)
Filter media depth (m)
Recycle ratio (%)
PAC dose (Jar test result)

Pilot plant

Full-scale plant

2.03.5
0.7
0.25
15

250
21
64
15

120
60
60
0.6
19
packed type
330550
1
0.3
30
2 mg/l as Al

120
60
60
200
19
packed type
440
84.9
0.3
30
2 mg/las Al

discharge into a center clear-well, where there is an

euent pipe.
The full-scale plant has a suction hood for backwashing the sand lters. One sand-lter section is
individually backwashed while the other sections
continue to lter water. In case the turbidity of raw
water reveals average value, backwash water should
be recycled back to the otation tank, if not, it
could be discharged. The whole system is controlled
automatically by the aid of equipped sensors for
water level, ow rate, backwashing time, etc.
EXPERIMENTS

Table 2 shows the experimental conditions and specications for the pilot and full-scale DAF plant. The pilot
plant has operated for 1 year and the full-scale plant was
tested for 4 months. Pilot tests include three stages of operation: (1) varying surface loading rates, in order to nd
optimum surface loading rates for removing turbidity, (2)
ADT pressure changing, also to nd optimum ADT pressure, (3) compare the water treatment results obtained
from the pilot-scale and the full-scale DAF. Then, the
whole process operation was adopted for the full-scale
DAF operation. Finally, a comparison of the performance
between the full-scale DAF plant and the conventional
plant was investigated.
As shown in Table 2, in order to nd optimum operating conditions we varied ow rate, which means the variation of surface loading rates, ADT pressure for the pilotscale experiments. Jar testing started at the beginning of
pilot plant operations. PAC (poly-aluminum chloride) was
used for coagulant and no pH adjustment was carried out
during operation. Optimum PAC dose was dened as
those produced low turbidity and UV254 by Jar-tests. An
PAC dose of 2 mg/l (as Al conc.) was most eective to
remove turbidity and UV254.
Samples were taken periodically from the sampling
point for raw water, after otation and ltration. Analysis
was made for turbidity, TOC, chlorophyll-a, UV254
according to Standard Methods. Turbidimeter was HACH

820

Yong Chung et al.

2100 N, TOC was analyzed with Shimadzu TOC 5000

analyzer. Iron and manganese were measured using an
atomic absorption spectrophotometer (Shimadzu, Japan).
RESULTS

Scale-up
Besides the scale-up strategy mentioned in Table
1, we tried an additional approach, that is: maintaining equal surface loading rate during scale-up. It
is very important to get a laminar ow for bubble
rising ow in a otation tank. The sudden change
of surface loading would lead a bad eect on
bubble ow.
We applied the dimensions and the operating
parameters from a pilot plant to a full-scale plant
design keeping in geometrically similar. The law of
similitude and design results for dierent units of
full-scale plant are shown in Table 2.
As shown in Table 3, the retention time is not
the value of 1, but 0.67. It means that the retention
time for the two dierent plants diers from each
other. Reducing retention time in the full-scale
plant is good for minimizing the tank volume and
saving construction costs. If the treated water qualities reach unacceptable values, it would be some
failure in the design of the full-scale DAF.
Raw water quality
Some of the raw water quality data collected
during the study are given in Table 4. Although the
raw water turbidity ranged 364 NTU, the tests
were carried out under the same water qualities for
the pilot and full-scale DAF. The total organic carbon (TOC) had an average value of 1.45 mg/l.
These conditions, low TOC and very cold water,
made the upper area of Han River a good and conservative case for investigating occulation. In cold
water, coagulants would be slower to react and
tend to produce small oc particles.
Finding optimum surface loading rate for the pilot
plant
So many important operating parameters were
recognized for the DAF plant up to now, which
were nding optimum coagulation, ADT pressure
and determining types of DAF (circular or rectangular), recycle ratios, surface loading rates, etc.
In this study, we focused on optimization of surface
loading rates and ADT pressure. Edzwald (1993)
reports that surface loading rates at full-scale DAF
plants typically range from 5 to 15 m3/m2 h, higher

than settling processes, particularly conventional

sedimentation.
Pilot testing was conducted at the surface loading
rates of 5, 7.5, 8.6 m3/m2 h. The results of removal
eciency in terms of turbidity, KMnO4 consumption, UV254 are presented in Fig. 2. The turbidity
removal eciency change with the surface loading
rates is not appeared sharply as compared to
KMnO4 consumption and UV254 removal. From
this gure it is evident to note that the excellent
removal eciency is obtainable with a surface loading rate of 7.5 m3/m2 h.
Surface loading rates and ADT pressure
In order to increase solid separation eciency,
small air bubbles should be formed, which relies
strongly on the proper design and operation of the
air dissolving tube (saturator). The theory of the
process of bubble formation is known as the free
energy variation due to the pressure drop. Higher
pressure produces smaller bubbles, but there is a
diminishing return in reducing the bubble size.
Above 500 kPa, increasing the ADT pressure has a
small eect on bubble size (De Rijk et al., 1994).
To ensure small bubbles, ADT gauge pressure of
400600 kPa are recommended and under the this
condition 10100 mm micro-bubbles are formed in
those pressure ranges (Edzwald and Walsh, 1992).
Figure 3 shows the relationship between the surface loading rates and turbidity removal eciencies
with the ADT pressure. Successful performance was
consistently achieved at a surface loading rate of
7.5 m3/m2 h. When the surface loading rate is 5 m3/
m2 h, turbidity removal eciency is the most excellent at an ADT pressure of 550 kPa, compared to
pressure at 330, 440 kPa. However, when the loading rate increased to 7.5 m3/m2 h, the ADT pressure
of 440 kPa shows the most excellent performance.
And loading rate at 8.6 m3/m2 h, ADT pressure of
440 kPa has poorer turbidity removal than that of
330 and 550 kPa. From the previous experiment, it
was obtained that the optimum surface loading rate
is 7.5 m3/m2 h, so we determined the optimum operating condition for ADT pressure at 440 kPa.
Comparison of the pilot and full-scale DAF under the
same surface loading
The full-scale plant was monitored after the
period of the pilot plant tests, and had the same
surface loading. Conditions were set as close as
possible to the pilot plant except for retention time
at otation tank. Results for chlorophyll-a re-

Table 3. Design results of the full-scale DAF

Unit facility
Rapid mixing tank
Flocculation tank
Flotation tank

Law of similitude used

Design data

Tr=1
Tr=1
Tr=0.67, SL=1

2m  3m  3.5m, t = 5 min 120 rpm

2 tank, 3m  3m  3.5m, t = 12 min, 60 rpm
2 tank b5.5 m  0.9 m, t = 9.5 min

Practical scale-up of DAF system

821

Table 4. Raw water quality

Items
Temperature
pH
Turbidity
UV254
KmnO4 consumption
Chlorophyll-a
Alkalinity
Mn
Fe
TOC

Units

Range

Average

8C

NTU
abs./cm
mg/l
mg/l
mg/l
mg/l
mg/l
mg/l

413
7.347.89
2.5862.6
0.170.074
2.328.36
2.8323.55
16.6753.0
0.0090.075
0.0791.37
1.533.27

7.5
7.65
4.1
0.075
3.31
7.08
45.0
0.047
0.32
1.45

duction are shown in Fig. 4. It is clear that the fullscale plant performance is not as good as that of
the pilot plant in otation. After otation, the average chlorophyll-a reduction is approximately 80%
(compared with the average value of 91% for the
pilot plant); interestingly, full-scale plant showed a
better performance for ltered water in chlorophylla reduction.
It became possible to predict that the high values
for chlorophyll-a concentration in otation tank for
the full-scale DAF were due to a higher chlorophyll-a concentration in raw water. If there were
any problems in treating chlorophyll-a and coagulation conditions, it would probably indicate inadequate operation. Anyway, the results of
chlorophyll-a reduction will be carefully studied in
further research
A plot of the pilot plant and full-scale results for
turbidity reduction are presented in Fig. 5. During
the study period, the pilot and full-scale plants were
able to meet a turbidity limitation of 1 NTU (in
Korea). Overall, ltered water turbidity was 0.2
0.3 NTU. However, it appeared that the full-scale
plant performed a little bit poorer than the pilot
plant in oated water turbidity. Possible explanations for this dierence are: (1) the retention time

was longer than that of the pilot-scale plant; (2) at

the middle of the otation tank in full-scale plants,
turbulent mixing conditions may occur when the
backwashing hood operated, or the backwash water
is redischarged to the otation tank. If fragile ocs
were prepared, the turbulent mixing would shear
the oc particles, producing micrometer sized particles. This would yield poorer otation performance compared to the pilot-scale DAF; (3) slight
deviations from the optimum steady state may have
occurred during the tests due to the full-scale DAF
runs at various operation conditions such as startup period, xing some parts of plant, adjusting
automatically operated parts). In further research, a
great deal of consideration is needed to nd an optimal backwashing time and backwash water discharging method.
Schmidt et al. (1995) presented that they could
reduce raw water UV254 up to 2030% by pre-ozonation. Also, the DAF having a post-ozonation system achieved average overall UV254 removal of
84%. Plummer et al. (1995) (Fig. 6) showed that
the removal of UV254 was expected to be about
50% and removal of DOC was 30 or 50%.
However, they were conducted under a bench-scale
experiment and used ferric chloride as a coagulant.

Fig. 2. The relation between surface loading rates and removal of turbidity, KMnO4 consumption,
UV254 reduction.

822

Yong Chung et al.

Fig. 3. Optimum air dissolving tube pressure is obtained at 440 kPa.

In this study, the pilot and full-scale DAF plants

achieved average overall UV254 removals of 25 and
32%, respectively. The full-scale plant revealed better performance than the pilot-scale DAF. The
dierence between our study result and Plummer's
result can be primarily attributed to dierences in
experimental conditions such as apparatus capacity
(bench-scale), raw water quality (turbidity range:
1.21.4 NTU, UV254: 0.0620.069 cm1) and coagulant, etc.
The results of TOC removals are shown in Fig. 7.
The TOC reduction follows very similarly the trend
observed for UV254 Ferguson et al. (1995) demonstrated that the DAF combined with pre-ozonation
process could reduce the TOC about 30 and 36%
by direct ltration. Some of the other researchers
used dierent coagulant, occulation process, operation method; especially the shape of DAF was

dierent from each other. Then, it is dicult to

compare the experimental results directly.

Fig. 4. Comparison of the pilot and the full-scale plant for

removal of chlorophyll-a.

Fig. 5. Comparison of the pilot and the full-scale plant on

reduction of turbidity.

Comparison of the DAF and the conventional plant

The water treatment plant in the City of NamYang Ju consists of two lines of DAF and conventional process working parallel to each other. The
actual dierences are in clarication only.
Sedimentation works with a steady capacity of
7000 m3/day and the DAF plant with 5000 m3/day.
A summary of the results for turbidity, KMnO4
consumption, UV254, TOC, Fe, Mn, chlorophyll-a
reduction for the full-scale DAF plant and the conventional plant are presented in Tables 4 and 5.
During the study period, DAF and the conventional treatment plant were able to meet the turbidity
goal of 1 NTU in over all of the runs. Filtration
following otation produced water with an average
turbidity of 0.2 NTU. Overall, ltered water turbid-

Practical scale-up of DAF system

823

Fig. 6. Comparison of the pilot and the full-scale plant on reduction of UV254.

ity for CGS was 0.42 NTU higher than that of the
DAF.
Testing for TOC was performed a number of
times during operation. Treatment by DAF reduced
the TOC by a mean of 28% in otation and 29%
in ltration. Treatment by conventional treatment
processes reduced the TOC by a mean of 18% in
sedimentation and 9% in slow speed sand ltration.
An increase of the TOC value occurred during sand
ltration. Also, the TOC in the DAF euent was
lower than that of the conventional sedimentation
euent. For other data, such as reduction of
UV254, Fe, Mn, chlorophyll-a, the DAF plant
shows better performance than that of the conventional plant.
Based on these results, the DAF system should
have substantial advantages over the conventional
process in all matters.
CONCLUSION

We scaled-up the DAF plant from a pilot-scale

(72 m3/day) to a full-scale (6000 m3/day) plant, and
the sand-oat type DAF was used. When considering the scale-up of DAF to full-scale, sucient conceptual nature of engineering has to be performed

on the pilot-scale in order to establish the parameters applicable to the full-scale plant. The concept of maintaining equal surface loading rate into
scaling-up of DAF was a proper practice and strategy. The process of optimization for pilot-scale
DAF has been done as follows: surface loading
rate, air dissolving tube pressure. The ndings indicated that optimum conditions of surface loading
rate and air dissolving tube pressure were 7.5 m3/m2
day and 440 kPa, respectively.
It was also found that the removal eciency for
turbidity, TOC and UV254 from the full-scale plant
was as good as those from the pilot plant for the
same surface loading rates. These results support
the availability of scaling-up in DAF.
Performance comparisons between the full-scale
DAF plant and the conventional plant located in
the city of Nam-Yang Ju are presented. Although
the DAF and the conventional plant seemed to
treat the water adequately, the DAF process
showed higher eciency of improving the water
quality in general, namely, turbidity, TOC, UV254,
Fe and Mn. We, therefore, conclude that DAF system has substantial advantages over the conventional process in all matters.

Fig. 7. Comparison of the pilot and the full-scale plant on removal of TOC.

824

Yong Chung et al.

Table 5. Water treatment results of the DAF and the conventional plant
Process

items

raw
water

after
otation

DAF
sand-lter

sedimentation

slow
sand lter

after
chlorination

Korean
Standard

Turbidity (NTU)
KmnO4 consumption (mg/l)
TOC (mg/l)
UV254
Fe (mg/l)
Mn (mg/l)
Chlorophyll-a (mg/l)

4.09
3.37
1.34
0.088
0.322
0.047
8.42

0.84
1.99
0.96
0.057
0.089
0.016
1.56

0.197
1.57
0.95
0.055
0.053
0.011
0.33

2.65
2.84
1.11
0.074
0.223
0.024
7.93

0.42
3.22
1.23
0.0697
0.050
0.034
2.01

0.17
1.47
1.45
0.057
0.065
0.015
0.01

1<
10 <

0.3 <
0.3 <

AcknowledgementsThis research was supported by a

grant from the G7 project of ``Development of Advanced
Water Treatment Technologies Advanced Disinfection
Techniques and Control for Disinfection by-Products''.
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