Trojan Technologies uses mercury-based ultraviolet (UV) lamps in reactors to purify water. When there are multiple closely spaced lamps in a reactor, significant UV emitted by the various lamps can reach, and 'interact' with neighbouring lamps. Although many of the optical phenomena occurring in a UV reactor are well understood and accounted for in current models, the fate of UV photons from one lamp reaching the plasma of a neighbouring lamp after travelling through the intervening air, quartz, and water has not been investigated in detail. These photons can be transmitted through the plasma, absorbed and re-emitted, or lost. The goal of this project was to develop a more accurate model, which accounts for these plasma interactions, to better predict the UV distribution throughout a reactor. We developed a Monte Carlo theoretical model of the photon-plasma interactions; predictions of this model agree well with work in the literature. We further validated our model by performing several optical experiments with UV lamps.
