Foreseen standards regarding microorganism content for drinking water require assessment of the capability of existing plants to reach the upcoming requirements. This paper presents the development of a tool to assess this capability in a commonly encountered key step of water disinfection: ozonation. In this paper, this tool is applied to the test case of an ozonation channel of the Belgian drinking water producer Vivaqua. This tool is based on a mathematical model of the momentum and mass transport phenomena in an ozonation channel. The gas-liquid flow is coupled to ozone mass transfer and kinetics describing the ozone and microorganisms concentrations decay. The degradation of Bacillus subtilis spores, as a representative of resistant microorganisms, is implemented in the model. The model takes explicitly into account the bubble size variation and its impact on mass transfer. Bubbles sizes and kinetics parameters are estimated based on dedicated experiments. The model is partially validated by comparing simulations results, obtained using computational fluid dynamics, to experimental residence time distributions, residual ozone concentration and Bacillus subtilis spores degradation efficiency measurements obtained on the studied ozonation channel. It is shown that, at the industrial scale, bubble diameter variation has a significant impact on ozone concentration in the liquid at the reactor exit. Using the tool, it is also shown that, the ozonation channel of Vivaqua can be used to achieve degradation of resistant microorganisms but only with its maximal flow rate and concentration of ozone injection. Moreover, at low operating temperature, some microorganisms that present latency towards reaction with dissolved ozone might hardly be destroyed. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.