The oxidation ditch (OD) plays an important role in wastewater treatment plants. With increasing demand and production costs, the energy consumption and sludge deposition occurring in the OD must be diminished to enhance its development. In this paper, a two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of water and activated sludge examined the flow field characteristics of an OD, consisting of two side-by-side propellers. The system was studied under five configurations, where the spacing between the propellers was set equal to −0.2, −0.1, 0, 0.1, 0.2 times the length of the OD. The viscosity and settling rate of activated sludge was imported in the numerical simulation through a user defined function (UDF). The optimal scheme of the propeller’s power consumption, velocity distribution, and sludge concentration distribution was obtained. The result shows that sludge concentrations are linked with dead zone velocity but not necessarily with low velocities. Experiments confirmed the validity of the velocity flow field simulated by the two-phase CFD model. Overall, these findings form the basis for the propellers distribution optimization and allow a deeper insight into the flow field of OD systems.

To provide theoretical basis for cavitation noise control, the cavitation evolution around a hydrofoil and its induced noise were numerically investigated. A modified turbulence model and Zwart cavitation model were employed to calculate the flow field and predict the cavitation phenomenon accurately. Then, the acoustic analogy method based on the Ffowcs Williams-Hawking (FW-H) equation was applied to analyze the cavitation-induced noise. Seven cavitation numbers were selected for analysis. Acoustic power spectral density (PSD) and acoustic pressure were investigated to establish the relationship between cavitation number and their acoustic characteristics. It was indicated that as cavitation number decreases, cavitation cycle length gets shorter and the magnitude of acoustic power spectral density increases dramatically. One peak value of acoustic power spectral density induced by the extending and retracting of leading-edge cavitation can be obtained under sheet cavitation conditions, while under cloud cavitation, two peak values of acoustic power spectral density can be obtained and are induced by superposition from leading-edge cavitation and trailing vortex.