Industrial Wastewater Treatment

Existing & Emerging Technologies

Industries served

Ozone, Membrane Filtration, Nanotechnology and Natural Treatment Systems

There have been many recent improvements to existing technologies, not just in their operation but in the manner in which they are used. Some of these changes are directly attributable to improvements in technology such as controls and logic with some more along the lines of an expanded group of applications.

Ozone

Ozone as a technology has been around since the mid-1800’s, however it has had only minimal acceptance and application. Since that time, the majority of ozone treatment system applications have been for water treatment disinfection. Several benefits of ozone over other more conventional disinfection technologies such as chlorine is its ability to remove many more of the refractory type pollutants as well as known carcinogen precursor compounds.
More recently, greater interest in wastewater treatment has developed. When used as a part of the wastewater treatment process, its role includes: pretreatment, primary treatment, odor control as well as disinfection. Industrial processes of more recent interest are treatment of hydraulic fracking flowback and produced water and other water intensive processes whereby economic and water conservation advantages exist. In this particular case, onsite treatment of fracking waters allows for almost immediate reuse of treated water resulting in reduced demand for fresh water and the need for offsite hauling for further treatment.

Membrane Filtration

As the name implies, membrane filtration physically removes particles based largely on particle sizes and well as the method. Generally speaking, movement of the liquid through the filter is by means of pressure from the high to low pressure zones, or differential pressure. Particle filtration occurs with pore sizes of about 10 micrometers and larger and at the other end of the scale, reverse osmosis occurs with pore sizes of less than 1 nanometer. Just to give a sense of scale, a nanometer is 1/1,000th of a micrometer.

Nanotechnology

As the names suggest, nanomembrane filtration is the process of filtering water through media with holes about one nanometer in size. This enables this method of filtration to remove total dissolved solids and organic materials, both natural and manmade, from aqueous compounds.

Natural Treatment Systems

There are a number of natural treatment systems for treating wastewater today. Much like their more complex counterparts, these systems treat wastewater in a manner consistent to that which occurs in the natural environment, only under more ideal and controlled conditions. Some of the other common methods of natural wastewater treatment are various wetlands applications, various land application methods, peat moss bio-filtration and aquaculture with microalgae. Beyond the municipal type applications, natural treatment systems have found their place in treatment of industrial wastes and other similarly variable wastes as well. Some of the advantages of natural treatment systems in relation to more conventional and typically more complex, wastewater treatment systems are: ease of operation subsequent to less skilled operators, lower construction costs and lower operating costs. Some of the disadvantages of these are: less ability to control process, typically require larger treatment plant “footprint” as well more operator attention inspecting process and dealing with process environmental issues.