Food and Water: One Man's Vision

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Food and Water: One Man's Vision

Angelo Mazzei has always thought locally and acted globally. Born and raised in California’s San Joaquin Valley— one of the world’s most productive farming regions—Angelo worked for his uncle’s 10,000-acre farming operation after graduating from college.

There he saw a pressing need for a system that would allow farmers to safely and efficiently inject fertilizer into their irrigation water—a task made even more challenging with the 1968 introduction of high-pressure water supplies through the California Aqueduct, a 400-mile-long water conveyance system. A new approach was vital.

Angelo Mazzei harnessed the Venturi principle to efficiently combine water with air, oxygen, or ozone, revolutionizing water treatment and irrigation.

Mazzei thought back to an industrial engineering class he’d taken at Fresno State, which introduced him to the Venturi principle. By directing the flow of liquid through a constricted section of pipe, he could decrease the fluid’s pressure and create a vacuum that would draw and blend liquid fertilizer into the main water flow of an irrigation system. On a lathe in his garage, he crafted a new injector optimized for the job and received his first patent. In 1978, he and his wife Mary formed the Mazzei Injector Company at their Bakersfield home.

As Mazzei Injector Company outgrew their home location and moved into their current facilities, Angelo focused on building a team of dedicated professionals who stress innovation, quality and customer service.  Angelo believes that you are only as good as the people around you, and that team focus has led the company to where it is today.

Mazzei’s innovative Pipeline Flash Reactor―now fine-tuned with state-of-the-art computational fluid dynamics (CFD) modeling―packs powerful mixing and shearing action into an area only the length of 3 to 5 diameters of the mainstream pipeline.

Breath of Fresh Air

Angelo views the world in hydraulic terms. Working with his team, Mazzei solved a very local problem—the smell of a vegetable processing plant’s wastewater lagoon upwind of his Bakersfield home—by using his venturi injectors for wastewater treatment.

Mazzei approached the processor and offered to develop an injector system that would aerate the lagoon and minimize odors caused by anaerobic bacteria.

The resulting AirJection wastewater system revolutionized lagoon aeration, which was typically done with multiple mechanical “splashers” floating in the pond—requiring extensive maintenance and only as efficient as the lowest-performing unit—or expensive bubble systems.

By contrast, the Mazzei aeration solution required just a single pump on-shore to send water through a Mazzei injector, dramatically reducing operating costs and maintenance.

Within weeks, the water in the lagoon lightened in color. Odor, nitrogen and biochemical oxygen demand dropped dramatically, allowing the company to land-apply the treated water. And Angelo and Mary could open the windows of their home again.

Read the full article in the attachment!

Source: Mazzei Injector Company, LLC

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