Supercritical Water Oxidation Reactor

Supercritical water oxidation (SCWO) destroys hazardous organic waste by pushing water past its critical point (374 °C, 22.1 MPa), where organics and oxygen become fully miscible with water in a single dense-gas-like phase and oxidize completely to CO₂ and H₂O in seconds to minutes, without forming NOₓ, dioxins or furans the way incineration can. This simulator models a plug-flow SCWO reactor: waste particles flow through a 3D tube and oxidize with a probability set by real Arrhenius kinetics, so the measured destruction efficiency at the outlet tracks the textbook DE = 1 − e^(−k·τ) relationship as you tune temperature, pressure, residence time and oxygen excess. It also reproduces one of SCWO's core engineering headaches: as the fluid density collapses through the critical region, dissolved inorganic salts lose their solubility and precipitate out, visibly fouling the reactor wall.