Influence of Swimming Pool Design on Hydraulic Behavior: A Numerical and Experimental Study

A swimming pool can be considered as a chemical reactor with specific hydraulic and macro-mixing characteristics. The nature of flow into the pool depends on various characteristics, such as water inlets and outlets (number and position), pool geometry, and flow rate. This study investigates how swimming pool design affects hydraulic behavior based on experimental and computational fluid dynamics studies (CFD). This paper does not describe the hydraulic behavior of all existing swimming pools, however the cases studied here are representative of pool designs widely used in Europe and the United States. The model developed, based on the principle of a stirred reactor, could be used as a first approach in describing the hydraulic behavior of regular pools. This model is suitable for the study of physical and chemical phenomena with long characteristic times. Other, more advanced, models were shown to be more suitable to the case of fast chemical processes.