  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.
