Nutrient Concentration & Water Reclamation™ System

Typically we employ our Spiral Brush Screen, vibratory screen, or screw-presses to remove large solids from wastewaters prior to treating them with ultrafiltration. Some wastewaters don’t require ultrafiltration after coarse solids removal and can go directly into the FO.

For high-solids wastewaters like manure or digestate, we process it using our  stainless steel ultrafiltration modules. Our unique module geometry and stainless steel construction ensures high filtration rates, easy cleaning, and long filter life (10+ years!).  The UF modules contain porous metal tubes, allowing them to capture of all the suspended solids, bacteria, and even some larger dissolved compounds. This process results in a thick concentrate stream and a clarified product we call UF Permeate (or sometimes called “tea-water”).

The liquid “tea-water” or UF permeate is then pumped through our Forward Osmosis (FO) process. Instead of exposing traditional RO membranes directly to the UF permeate, which typically still contains a large amount of dissolved organic matter that leads to fouling and poor performance, we use Forward Osmosis to remove the water.  This liberated water is then recovered using Reverse Osmosis (RO), resulting in a very clean final effluent that is suitable for drinking water for animals, reuse onsite as washdown water, for irrigation, or river discharge.  This two-step process results in an overall lower cost of treatment, higher amount of water recovery, and less energy consumed.

The final step when water is reused is a redundant disinfection using ultraviolet (UV) light. Since nearly all organisms are considered to be removed by the UF and FO, this UV disinfection step is simply an extra precaution. Multiple safeguards ensure that our system will not release water that is not properly treated.