3. Results and Discussion
3.1. Kinetics study
Bulk decay kinetic model fitting with laboratory test data was evaluated by RMSE (Table 1). Results do not
show significant chlorine decay simulation improvements with the use of the 2R model, as it could be expected,
except for the 15ºC assay. For the 10ºC and 25ºC assays, all kinetic models performed similarly well and for the
20ºC assay the 2R model performed as well as the nth order one and both performed better than the first order
model. At the extreme temperature of 30ºC, the 2R model performed better than the nth order one, but worse than
the first order model.
The estimated value of n that most minimized the error of the nth model was not the same for all tests, ranging
from 0.7 to 2.0 (Table 1). For modeling purposes, an optimized value for n was determined by the sum of square
difference between model and measured values minimization of all laboratory tests. The obtained value was 1.2
and therefore the nth order model referred herein is a 1.2 order model.