Water treatment power supply?

[Flyback]

Hi,
When you have high voltage power supplies used in water treatment.
Do you know why the HV is needed?
Is it to produce the xrays that irradiate the water?
Do you know what voltage and power level such power supplies would be?

 

[sagor1]

Most water treatment I've seen in home use are using a UV lamp, which requires HV to trigger the tube (like a fluorescent lamp) There would be a ballast/HV box somewhere in the treatment setup.

 

[Flyback]

Thanks, do you know what processes require high voltage and high power, and if they also need high power, then why cant they use multiple high voltage power supplies of low power? (instead of one huge high voltage high power power supply)

 

[Tony Stewart]

Water has a Dk of 80 times air, so the rapid avalanche time of arcs becomes quite lossy in the plasma tubes to kill pathogens. I remember someone made million$ supplying the military with plasma tubes to decontaminate potential anthrax in water supplies back in the post-911 CIA war profiteering days with condensed plasma tubing in water purification.

Fluorescent tubes are basically UV radiators with 2 or 3 phosphors coating the glass inside to shift the wavelengths to visible white light. (I love tri-phosphors for true white light, 50kh MTBF/ 86 lpw efficiency)

For water purification, they wouldn't need the phosphors, so I imagine heavy-duty glass tubes and about >>10 watts per foot of tubing and enough tubing to exceed the decay rate times flow rate.

 

[patmandad]

A few years back I worked on two supply treatment facilities that used ozone bubbled up through the tanked water to kill the bacteria instead of bulk chemicles. To create this ozone (o*3) air is dried through a pair of mechanical and dessicant driers then sent down an ionizing tube that used single hivoltage hifreq power created from the 3 phase 12kv to create and bond the extra oxygen molecule. After bubbling through the water the ozone is converted back to o*2 by passing it over what is basically a nichrome heating element burning off the extra molecule. Not privy to all the tech but do know the circuitry to accomplish this was extensive. There was an issue blowing very expensive board one after another until it was discovered the 12kv was run too close to the ground grid under the now completed plants.