Biowater Technology innovative biological wastewater treatment

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

Moreover, the development of new local industries, especially food industries, can add external organic load to municipal plants. A secondary biological process is necessary to deal with these increased carbon loads.

High organic wastewater is often treated with a secondary biological anaerobic process, which has a number of benefits including compact plant size, low sludge yield and high energy efficiency. However, an aerobic post-treatment polishing step is usually needed to satisfy stringent effluent requirements, and these plants require large space.

Biowater Technology has developed HyVAB® (hybrid vertical anaerobic biofilm), a patented (EU Patent no. 2254842) ultra-high-rate technology for wastewater treatment. The solution integrates a high-rate anaerobic stage and a biofilm aerobic process vertically in one compact system. The tower design requires much less space than conventional treatment facilities and minimises energy use and sludge production.

The complete, full-scale HyVAB® plant is very compact, occupying a space of 546 square metres at a design loading of 552 cubic metres/day. Energy consumption is very low at 0.5 kWh/cubic metre wastewater.

Suitable for a wide range of municipal and industrial applications, the plant provides high removal efficiency of over 90 per cent COD and produces odourless effluent. It can reduce sludge production by up to 80 per cent, which in turn reduces the need for a desludging unit onsite.

Moreover, the plant produces biogas with high methane concentration (84 per cent v/v) which can be used for power/heat generation.

The HyVAB 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 roughly 3.3 per cent over the next five years to reach some USD 6 billion in 2023.

Biowater Technology designed, built and set up the first full-scale HyVAB® plant in 2016 for the fast-growing vegetable processing company Smaken av Grimstad in the city of Grimstad in Southern Norway, where the existing municipal wastewater treatment plant had limited organic treatment capacity. The plant continues to serve as an R&D base for full-scale HyVAB studies and technology development.

Pilot studies have shown that the solution is also effective for wastewater from the petrochemical and pharmaceutical industries.