CASE STUDY

AVRIO were appointed by a large Industrial Emissions Licenced facility within the Food & Beverage sector to optimise, reconfigure and manage wastewater treatment operations (Throughout the project) and oversee reconfiguration processes.

The company, an extremely successful player within the food and beverage industry, aimed to achieve significant resource usage reductions and cost savings with minimal expenditure.

The project consisted of three phases:

• Review of current operations prior to treatment processes, treatment processes and IEL Schedule requirements;
• Propose reconfiguration and trial such proposals thereafter;
• Fully reconfigure processes based on trial findings to achieve the overall goal.

A review and analysis of existing on-site operations, raw wastewater streams, wastewater constituents and wastewater volumes provided AVRIO with considerable detail on the pre-treatment processes, and thus AVRIO could provide recommendations to optimise and further minimise wastewater volumes and reduce constituents within, i.e., Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Suspended Solids, and the overall load on the wastewater treatment system.

Current wastewater treatment plant stages, configuration, monitoring logs, data sets, chemical input, bioaugmentation processes, hydraulic retention time and discharge constituents were all reviewed and analysed to determine how efficient the current wastewater treatment system was operating, and to see where changes, and thus savings, could be made.

AVRIO proposed optimisation changes to operational processes and ran trials thereafter on such processes upstream to minimise resource consumption, chemical usage and overall load on the wastewater treatment plant.

Once upstream processes were optimised. AVRIO could then optimise the wastewater treatment process to treat this new wastewater stream. AVRIO proposed changes to primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment processes, to include screening, balancing tank, dissolved air floatation treatment processes, chemical addition processes, MLSS, aeration and anoxic processes and included variable speed controls to such processes for energy savings.

The project was monitored prior to optimisation works and concluded:

• An overall reduction in water consumption of 22 %;
• An overall reduction in electricity consumption of 28 %;
• An overall reduction in chemical usage of 36%;

while achieving the desired effluent criteria.