Biowater Technology aerobic biofilm-based wastewater treatment

Rapidly growing cities across the globe face numerous challenges relating to industrial and municipal wastewater treatment. These include rising population, environmental regulatory requirements, space limitations, increasing organic wastewater, and high capital expenditure and operating expenses.

In particular, municipal and industrial wastewater usually contains ammonia, phosphorous, organics and other contaminants and must be treated before being discharged into water bodies.

An anaerobic process is generally used for treating wastewater with high organic concentration due to compact plant size, low sludge yield and high energy efficiency. However, for anaerobic effluent polishing of low to medium organic strength and high ammonia content wastewater, aerobic processes are generally needed to satisfy stringent wastewater discharge requirements.

Biowater Technology has developed CFIC® (continuous flow intermittent cleaning), a patented (EU Patent no. 2438019) high-rate biofilm technology for wastewater treatment. The solution is built on a moving bed biofilm reactor (MBBR) process with a high bio-carrier filling degree of 90 per cent. CFIC operates both in the normal and forward washing modes. The system is very compact, highly efficient and minimises energy use.

The full-scale CFIC® plant occupies 50 per cent less space and consumes 30 per cent less energy than a traditional MBBR system. The energy consumption for a complete municipal plant is very low at 0.68 kWh/cubic metre of wastewater treated.

The total investment for a CFIC plant is 25 per cent lower than for conventional treatment facilities.

Suitable for a wide range of municipal and industrial applications, the plant provides a high removal efficiency rate of over 90 per cent for chemical oxygen demand (COD) and 96 per cent for NH4-N. Moreover, the effluent sludge settles fast, which is suitable for filtration processes.

The CFIC solution, like all Biowater Technology’s solutions, can be customised and retrofitted to most of the existing infrastructure of an industrial or municipal plant.

The global water and wastewater treatment market is expected to grow by about 3.5 per cent over the coming years to reach USD 6.5 billion in 2025.

Biowater Technology designed, built and set up the first full-scale CFIC® plant in 2013 for petrochemical wastewater treatment at Norsk Spesialolje in Southern Norway. The company also set up a first-of-its-kind, three-stage CFIC plant for nitrogen and organic removal in China in 2016.

Another full-scale CFIC project for anaerobic effluent polishing is underway at GE Healthcare’s Lindesnes facility. This plant will be fully operational in late 2019.