White Paper: Dewatering in the Wastewater Treatment Process – the Key to an Efficiency Improvement

Technical, legal and social pressure on the operator is rising. The agricultural use of sewage sludge face less acceptance, thus, the demand for the expensive combustion of sewage sludge will increase. Consequently, the costs for polymer consumption, sludge transport and disposal will rise. These three cost factors were targeted by scientists of the German research institute CUTEC GmbH, when they analysed the sewage sludge dewatering process. The result was a highly effective possibility to reduce costs significantly in a short term, often with payback periods less than one year. This could be realize by a compact plant module which is easyly installed into the existing plant and pre-treats the sewage sludge before dewatering. For polymer initiated flocforming processes, this new two-step conditioning unit could taylormade the floc structure for any dewatering process. The new conditioning unit has been applied in the waste water treatment, landfill leacheate treatment and sewage sludge dewatering so far. Combining conventionell separation units with this new conditioning unit will lead to an improved separation efficiency as well as to a significantly reduced polymer consumption.

To summarize: a higher dewatering efficiency is possible by forming optimized flocs!

Taxonomy

• Wastewater Treatment
• Dewatering