Dm for monochloramine?

Hello Wayne,

I asked around and received some feedback on this from a few of my colleagues. 

Determining the diffusivity may be difficult. Historically, one source of values for things like this is the Perry's handbook of Chemistry or CRC Tables.

Depending on the relative size of diffusivity vs, advection, often the diffusivity is negligible. So, a sensitivity analysis may help; start with chlorine and see how sensitive results are to this parameter.

One thing to consider is that a regular constituent analysis may not work well for Chloramine. You may want to look into the Multi-species Extension (MSX) functionality, which is included in recent versions of WaterCAD and WaterGEMS. You can read more about MSX in the Help and here:

What's New with WaterGEMS/WaterCAD V8i SELECTSeries 5

Here is an article on our Wiki about challenging with mixing Chlorine and Chloramines:

Mixing Chlorine and Chloramines

If you need more help, you might try posting on other places such as the EPANET listserv from the University of Guelph:

LISTSERV.UOGUELPH.CA LISTSERV Server (16.0) LISTSERV@LISTSERV.UOGUELPH.CA

We'd be interested to hear about successes you have with modeling this using MSX.

Wayne,
Were you able to find any useful info on modeling with Chloramines? I work at a park where we receive water from a municipal supply that uses Chloarmines. We have a hydraulic model of our system from our point of connection to the Muni system on down. I am convinced that we receive water with a high enough Chloramine concentration that we do not need to supplemental disinfect; especially because others want to supplemental disinfect with Chlorine, which to me doesn't make any sense because you have to be able to get through break point so that you now have Free Chlorine and are not causing Dichloramine to be created and chlorine concentration stay in the trough of the breakpoint curve. Seems almost impossible to do that with an injection pump with any degree of certainty. But, how can I accurately model Chloramine decay in our system? It would be great to find some actual step by step directions including what field data needs to be collected. I have a Masters in Env. Engineering and reading about this stuff still makes my head spin. There has to be a practical straight forward way to look at this during the design phase that doesn't require jar tests and the like or no?? Published values for reaction equations and constants? The incoming water can always be changing, so I assume you would have to monitor this source water over a year so to determine the worst time and chemistry and then design based on those characteristics but allow flexibility for operation. Seems like you would constantly be trying to hit a moving target and require very detailed monitoring and sampling of the water.

Any tips on modeling with Chloramines would be appreciated.

Modeling chloramine decay can be straightforward. Measure the bulk decay in a bottle decay test in the lab and adjust the wall coefficient based on field measurements to achieve calibration just as you would for free chlorine.

Modeling what happens at a chloramine booster station is much more difficult. You could model it using the multi-species extension (MSX) option in WaterGEMS. However, you probably don't have all the coefficients needed to do this.

I'm skeptical about the value of simply adding chlorine as you mention because of breakpoint chlorination issues. You must do some lab experiments to determine dosages for your water. I would think that you would need to add both chlorine and ammonia but I'm not sure if you can get by with only using stoichiometric feed rates because you can't be sure of the chloramine coming into the booster.

This is gong to require a pretty sophisticated control setup.

Once you figure out how to achieve a set chloramine concentration coming out of the booster, you can model the downstream system using a Setpoint Booster with a known outlet concentration.

This is a downside of using chloramines. If you don't get it right, you can end up with no residual disinfectant and/or nitrification.