The T1 method and the engineering question

The Aguas SB T1 method organises preliminary sizing of a combined treatment around three questions: how much treatment exposure the water receives, what fraction of its load responds under the selected conditions, and where the removed material ends up. It connects recirculation, composition, modules, operating hours and consumption through executable code. Its contribution is to make those relationships examinable, not to replace chemistry with a universal percentage.

Edition 2.0 describes the T1 2.3 calculation core captured on 7 October 2026. Aguas SB develops and sells the equipment. The method therefore has applied and commercial interests; publication enables review but does not constitute an independent assessment of the manufacturer. Public numerical examples are synthetic unless explicitly attributed to a scientific publication.

The problem to be solved

An industrial operator may know the daily water volume and a laboratory analysis without knowing how long a unit should run or what result to expect. A researcher may know removal achieved in a small reactor without enough information to transfer it to an installation. Both questions encounter the same difficulty: a percentage without exposure, matrix and measurement boundaries does not specify a treatment.

A statement that a unit removes 60% does not identify whether it concerns COD, colour, solids or an individual compound. Nor does it establish whether the sample was settled, whether dilution occurred, how long the trial lasted or how much electrical charge was supplied. Equal percentages can describe very different processes. Different percentages can be consistent with the same mechanism under different loads or exposures.

The method turns a commercial description into a calculable question: for this water, target, topology and exposure budget, what outlet does the model estimate and what test would support or revise it? The answer includes a concentration, an operating balance and a domain of applicability. It does not end with a module count.

Three connected pillars

Exposure. Recirculation accounts for volume passed through the units relative to a reference volume. Current and time, energy, pressure, aeration and separation must accompany it. The same turnover count does not imply the same dose when equipment or its operating point changes.

Treatable capacity. A removal curve can approach a plateau. T1 represents this through operational ceilings and matrix factors. A plateau may reflect finite dose, a persistent fraction, slow transport, changing composition or incomplete separation. The proposed parameter enables calculation; its physical interpretation requires those possibilities to be distinguished.

Material fate. Reducing a pollutant in the aqueous phase is useful even when some of it enters sludge. However, transfer, transformation and mineralisation are different processes. A plant balance must retain the management of solids and other streams even when effluent quality improves substantially.

A synthetic example connects these pillars. In 10 m3, a COD of 1000 mg O2/L represents 10 kg of oxygen-demand equivalent. If separated water leaves at 400 mg O2/L with the same volume, that stream retains 4 kg. The 6 kg difference cannot be called mineralised without examining solids, other streams and transformation. If duration or electrical charge is also unknown, the result cannot size another unit solely from tank litres.

Relationship with the literature

Published work already uses per-pass models for hydrodynamic cavitation and investigates scale dependence. These are relevant antecedents for our exposure coordinate without automatically identifying T1 coefficients. Per-pass model, vortex-device scale-up.

An institutional report on industrial treatment offers an operation-selection perspective. Hernández Lehmann's thesis studies electrocoagulation. Research on olive-mill wastewater combines separation and Fenton oxidation. These references address different aspects of the problem; bringing them together does not add their efficiencies or imply their authors endorse T1. madri+d report, UPM thesis, integrated treatment study.

The gap addressed here is practical: an integrated, reproducible formulation for the commercial configuration considered, connected to scale questions and comparable test conditions. This does not require claiming that nobody previously combined processes or proving the worldwide absence of related models.

The meaning of engineering inference

Installation experience can motivate relationships before a complete identification campaign exists. Removing solids between stages might change the response of the next stage; a more concentrated matrix might consume more treatment capacity; a hydraulic change might alter yield per exposure. Such propositions are useful when they specify what remains constant and what observation would contradict them.

Inference becomes stronger through balances, experience and external testing, but repetition across pages does not change its evidential category. A sizing rule must remain identified as a model rule. A measured coefficient must retain the conditions under which it was estimated. This distinction enables improvement without retroactively constructing supposed validation.

The choice is not between experience and science. It is to translate experience into observable hypotheses and use literature to design a more precise comparison. A located discrepancy adds knowledge: it may reveal an omitted separator, inconsistent units or a transport limit that a reduced model does not represent.

Using the corpus

For sizing, start with hydraulics, equations and worked examples. When comparing a paper, first identify matrix, regime and energy boundary, then consult the chapter on the relevant mechanism. For a measurement campaign, use measurement, uncertainty and protocol. When adding results to software, preserve the previous version and the conditions supporting the change.

The minimum reproducible result contains inputs, units, topology, schedule, flows, options, engine version and output. A numerical pass only means meeting specified targets; it is not a permit, a detailed design or a water-safety test.

A university can test the exposure hypothesis using its own device. If the relationship does not transfer, the result defines its limits rather than making the corpus useless. Conversely, agreement for one effluent does not establish universality. The purpose is a common language through which both outcomes can inform development.

The editorial criterion is specific: each chapter answers a different question, every example declares its origin, and each recommendation identifies its conditioning variables. Length serves that task. Method quality is judged by whether calculations can be repeated, challenged and improved, not by page or citation counts.