Advanced Industrial Wastewater Treatment Strategies

Industry today is coping with two water issues: quality and quantity. In many arid areas of the United States, the Middle East, Asia and Australia, water shortages due to drought and rising demand have put pressure on industry to conserve and use less process water. Industry has two water quality issues. Intake water often has to be purer than the water used for drinking and bathing. In addition, discharges of process water in industrial treatmentsystems to streams, rivers, estuaries, and lakes require rigorous effluent treatment to reduce contamination of these water bodies.

Traditional Industrial Wastewater Treatment

Historically, water and wastewater treatment plants have used a a variety of strategies to remove contamination from their influent and effluent waters so that it can be either used as process water or discharged to the sanitary sewer. Among the technologies that can be used for water and waste water treatment are ion exchange, reverse osmosis, filtration, flocculation, oil-water separators or biological treatments. Most industrial plants that require high quality water have separate water and wastewater treatment systems with the influent water used in the plant and then sent as used process water to wastewater treatment plants. The plant must then make a significant investment in separate water and wastewater treatment systems.

The Changing Economics of Process Water Use and Disposal

Today, the economics for industrial wastewater treatment and water treatment are changing because of water shortages, rising commodity prices and a higher degree of water and waste water treatment. Current average national prices are increasing more than the rate of inflation for water purchase and wastewater disposal. Nationwide average wastewater disposal rates have increased by 12.1% from 2002-2004. Historically, wastewater rates had risen 2-4% above the CPI from 1986 to 2002. However, among industrial and commercial groups there are widely different wastewater discharge rates based on surcharges for carbon oxygen demand, solids content, flow of their wastewater and degree of effluent treatment. Among the industry groups with the highest wastewater discharge rates are specialty food manufacturing, drum and barrel manufacturing, inorganic chemicals manufacturing, and paint manufacturing and others that use metals or solvents in their process. Water purchase prices are also increasing faster than the CPI.

Rising costs for water, wastewater disposal and rising commodity prices have many corporations rethinking their water and waste water treatment strategies looking to reduce costs. Instead of only considering environmental regulations in their decision making, companies are now looking at other factors in their waste water treatment capital investment models including:

1. Economic value of the commodities discharged in wastewater
2. Permit costs
3. Purchase costs for process water
4. Disposal Costs for wastewater
5. Waste Disposal costs
6. Costs of wastewater treatment systems

By considering all of these factors, one question arises-why cant we recover our process chemistry and our water from our effluent treatment and reuse these valuable resources in our plant to reduce our costs?

Advanced Industrial Wastewater Treatment

Recovery and reuse of process water in industrial treatment systems requires a new technological strategy based on the separation of process water from the process chemistry. These advanced industrial wastewater treatment system combine traditional off-the-shelf technologies such as membranes, reverse osmosis, micro- and ultrafiltration with newer systems that allow recovery of water and process chemistries at a standard of quality that can be reused or recycled back into your process.

ThermoEnergy’s Resource and Recovery Technology

ThermoEnergy’s product line is based on its proprietary Controlled Atmosphere Separation Technology (CAST). This highly adaptable technology is combined with other traditional off-the shelf technologies such as ion exchange, carbon absorption etc. to provide a unique, efficient and cost effective treatment system that can recover at sufficient purity water, contaminates and feed stocks so that they can be reused or recycled.

The CAST technology adjusts temperature and pressure in a continuous flow system so that water or chemicals can be extracted based on their chemical and physical properties. This technology has two configurations, the CAST system that extracts water from the waste materials such as in a metal finishing plant and the RCAST system that extracts volatile compounds from water such as solvents from industrial wastewater. By using a vacuum, sensible heat, segregation of waste streams and the chemical properties of compounds used, the CAST technology can be designed for a specific process and can separate a wide variety of materials from metals to volatile organic compounds.

The diagram below illustrates the CAST technology:

How to Become the Lowest Cost Manufacturer through your wastewater treatment system:

As an example of what resource and recovery system can do for your plant, a CASTion client installed seven years ago several CAST systems for their chrome and nickel plating operation as a part of its zero liquid discharge process. The CAST wastewater treatment plants have reduced chrome purchases by 93% and nickel purchases by 65%. Process water demand has been reduced by 95% and the plant does not discharge any water to the sanitary sewer. In the last three years nickel and chrome prices have increased by 75%.

Today, this client because it recovers its process chemistry has a competitive advantage over its competition allowing them to be the lowest cost manufacturer in their industry.

Contact Us to learn more about our innovative effluent water treatment.

Zero Liquid Discharge Wastewater Solution

Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) describes a process that completely eliminates liquid discharge from a system. The goal of any well-designed ZLD system is to minimize the volume of wastewater that requires treatment, process wastewater in an economically feasible manner, while also producing a clean stream suitable for reuse elsewhere in the facility. Interest in ZLD technology has grown in the industrial manufacturing sector over the past decade. Companies may begin to explore ZLD because of ever tightening wastewater disposal regulations, company mandated green initiatives, public perception of industrial impact on the environment, or concern over the quality and quantity of the water supply.

The equipment needed to achieve ZLD varies depending on the characteristics of the wastewater as well as the wastewater volume. Typical waste streams in an industrial setting include wastewater treatment reject typically from reverse osmosis (RO) or ion exchange, cooling tower blow down, spent coolants, DI regenerant, metal finishing wastewaters, tank or equipment washing wastewaters, and other miscellaneous industrial wastewaters such as compressor condensate and floor scrubber wash waters. The first step to achieving ZLD is to look for ways to limit the amount of wastewater that needs to be treated. Reducing the amount of wastewater almost always provides quick payback. For example, pre treating the water going to a cooling tower to reduce hardness and silica can increase the amount of time the water can be used before it becomes spent.

Once wastewater generation is minimized and the volume of wastewater that needs to be treated is known, you can then explore what equipment is needed. A traditional approach to ZLD is to use some sort of filtration technology, funnel the reject waters to an evaporator, and send the evaporator concentrate to a crystallizer or spray dryer. The downside to this is that the equipment to dewater the concentrate slurry tends to be very large and can be extremely expensive, which limits the cost effectiveness to only those with very large waste streams. The ENCON approach is unique because it uses cost effective, time-tested equipment that make it ZLD economically feasible for even moderately sized waste streams.

At the core of the ENCON ZLD solution is evaporation technology. Evaporation always figures prominently in most ZLD solutions because it has always been more hands off than other wastewater treatment methodologies resulting in a dramatically lower labor cost. Evaporation technology can handle a much wider range of waste streams compared to membranes and traditional physical / chemical treatment methodologies. Finally, evaporation does a much better job of concentrating waste streams compared to other methods, thereby yielding a lower cost for disposal.

Two types of evaporation technology are used in the ENCON ZLD solution. First, at a typical operating cost $0.01 – $0.02 per gallon of distillate, the ENCON Mechanical Vapor Compression (MVC) Evaporator is also very energy efficient and yields a high quality distillate. Models are available that can process 40 to 4,000 gallons of distillate per hour. More information on the ENCON MVC evaporator can be found here in our Mechanical Vapor Compression section. Second, the ENCON Thermal Evaporator can be used with a variety of heat sources, such as natural gas, propane, #2 fuel oil, waste oil, steam, and electricity. Capacities range from 8 to 400 gallons per hour. More information on ENCON Thermal Evaporators can be found here in our thermal evaporator system section.

Please refer to the flow chart diagram to the right for a typical layout for ENCON’s ZLD solution. Wastewater is fed to the ENCON MVC Evaporator followed by dewatering of the MVC concentrate by an ENCON Thermal Evaporator and a plate & frame filter press.

In the first stage, an MVC Evaporator is fed the wastewater and it yields distilled water and concentrate. The concentrate goes to a concentrate storage tank, which separates into slurry and supernatant layers. The supernatant layer gets pumped to an ENCON Thermal Evaporator, which further concentrates the liquid while exhausting water vapor to atmosphere. The concentrated slurry from the thermal evaporator is pumped back into the concentrate storage tank. The slurry layer from the tank is pumped into a thickener tank that is then pumped into a filter press. The filter press solids are dumped into a sludge disposal trough with filtrate going back to the concentrate tank.

A key feature of the ENCON approach to Zero Liquid Discharge is that it is can be implemented in stages over time. For example, a company may choose to install an ENCON MVC Evaporator to minimize their wastewater hauling expenses. A year or so later, they find that feeding a ENCON Thermal Evaporator from the MVCs concentrate holding tank to further reduce the volume of liquid waste makes financial and environmental sense. When the company finally decides to become a Zero Liquid Discharge facility, it is a simple matter of adding a filter press and accessories to the current wastewater process.

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