Advanced High Load FlooBed® MBBR Wastewater Technology Deployed to Australia

An advanced biological treatment for highly loaded industrial process or waste waters is being deployed in Australia by Eimco Water Technologies-AJM Environmental Services (EWT-AJM).

The FlooBed® Moving Bed Bioreactor (MBBR) technology tolerates higher variations in water quality and flow compared with conventional wastewater technologies, yet still maintains its high treatment efficiency.

MBBR biological treatment – which consists of micro-organisms both attached to the carriers and suspended in the water – has become the technology of choice internationally for several types of waste water, such as effluent from process industries, landfill leachate and municipal waste waters, says AJM-EWT National Sales Manager, Industrial/Municipal, Mr John Koumoukelis.

“This is a reliable and easy to operate technology that has been employed extensively with great success by the global Eimco Water Technologies Group, for which it is a key technology,” says Mr Koumoukelis.

“The success, originally founded on the pulp and paper industry, has now been extended to cover applications across the industrial spectrum, including food and beverage, manufacturing, resources and municipal. Already its potential has been demonstrated in Australia with the first projects here involving treatment of highly loaded waste water in the food and beverage sector,” he said.

FlooBed® processes are used to significantly increase the capacity of existing activated sludge systems, and FlooBed® Bioreactor technology is also suitable for covering the total effluent treatment of an industrial plant.

In contrast to traditional activated sludge processes, most of the microbes grow as biofilm on surface of the freely moving carriers. The plastic carrier elements inside FlooBed® Bioreactor have a large surface area and a structure which is optimized to protect the biofilm from abrasion. This allows a high amount of biomass inside the reactor and the needed reactor size can be kept small.

Savings in civil work costs are remarkable with the FlooBed® process, says Mr Koumoukelis.

Carriers are made of plastic, and their density is slightly lower than that of water. Because of this, carriers can be easily mixed through the EWT aeration system, which covers the entire reactor bottom. The process does not require backwashes, which are typical for conventional biofilm processes and consume a lot of energy, in addition to interfering with functioning of the process.

FlooBed® Bioreactor and Activated Sludge System as an Upgrade

The combination of a high-load FlooBed® Bioreactor and a low-load activated sludge plant is an efficient and stable solution for improved industrial effluent treatment. With FlooBed® Bioreactor the loading of a treatment process is reduced and peak loads are efficiently managed. This enables stable functioning of the following activated sludge stage and gives good quality discharge as a final result.

Industrial effluents typically have high concentration of organics and there are significant variations in both flow and concentration. FlooBed® BAS utilizes the advantages of conventional biofilm processes and combines them with the best features of activated sludge plants.

The compact FlooBed® BAS process can easily be installed both in greenfield factories or embedded into existing treatment systems, which are then modified to modern FlooBed® BAS processes.

Benefits of FlooBed® Bioreactor Based Processes:
1. Good treatment efficiency => low residual concentrations
2. Stable discharge water quality
3. A short start-up in the beginning and also after accidental or planned shutdowns
4. Excellent capacity for handling toxic compounds and load variations
5. Low sludge production
6. Small construction costs

Flowtex Disc Filter By Entex Works To Improve The Nation’s Water Infrastructure

FlowTex is a user-friendly, high performance tertiary filter, suitable for both small and large flow applications, that removes suspended solids as small as 10 microns. That’s important for water and wastewater plants that have stringent suspended solids discharge permit requirements, phosphorous limits or require re-use quality effluent.

How does it work?
Flow enters the filter through a pipe and completely surrounds the discs. The turbulence of the incoming wastewater keeps solids in suspension and prevents premature settling. As the flow passes through the cloth filter media, the suspended solids are removed. The unique design allows the operator monitoring the operation to view the filtered effluent of each filter segment through the individual discharge ports.

As solids accumulate on the cloth filter media, the flow through the media becomes restricted and the level of liquid in the tank rises. The backwash process is triggered when the level reaches a pre-determined point or after a set time period. The outside-to-inside flow ensures that solids stay trapped within the basin. The vacuum head rotates across the surface of the disc, removing captured solids from the media. The vacuum head rotates clockwise 360 degrees and then returns counter-clockwise in sequence for efficient media cleaning.

How will FlowTex save money for me and the community?
The FlowTex patented design incorporates a fixed disc with a rotating suction head that never touches the cloth media, thus extending the life of the media. Each disc is made up of two independently operated segments that can easily be replaced without taking the entire filter off-line. And because there is no need to drain the tank when replacing cartridges, water treatment facilities save time and money.

In addition, each disc is monitored separately, so effluent performance is easily verified and segments requiring service are easily identified. This means that the Entex FlowTex Disc filter produces cost-effective, high quality effluent with low O&M costs. Combined with Entex Technologies’ Integrated Fixed-film Activated Sludge (IFAS) and Submerged Fixed Film (SSF) systems, you have a complete biological nutrient removal system that meets very stringent and often costly total nitrogen (TN) limits.

Best of all, FlowTex filters can be retrofitted to existing concrete basins or sold as complete stand-alone filtration units.

About Entex Technologies Inc.
Entex Technologies is a leader in advanced biological wastewater technologies, designing and supplying custom engineered systems that increase concentrations of beneficial microbiology for treating wastewater. Entex’s Integrated Biofilm Systems improve the capacity and performance of municipal and industrial wastewater facilities at half the cost or less than traditional approaches. Entex is unique in offering both fixed and moving media systems (BioWeb and BioPortz) for Integrated Fixed-film Activated Sludge (IFAS) and Submerged Fixed-film (SFF and MBBR) processes.