2-month deployment of a pilot plant at a Scottish milk processing company

A dairy processing company from Scotland is planning to upgrade and expand its existing wastewater treatment plant in order to comply with increasingly stringent future environmental regulations.

CUSS was therefore assigned to install a pilot plant for a test period of two months in order to demonstrate the required wastewater treatment performance on a pilot scale before the large-scale wastewater treatment plant is implemented.

CONCEPTUAL FORMULATION

The system uses a submersible motor pump to pump the wastewater from an existing equalisation tank into a flocculation tank. In this tank, the pH value is adjusted by adding chemicals such as acid, lye and coagulant to precipitate a stable chemical sludge floc. In the next step, flocculation agent is dosed and the liquid/solid mixture is separated into its two phases in the dissolved air flotation plant. The clear water phase is sampled and then discarded. The solid phase is temporarily stored in sludge tanks and pumped to a sludge press, where the sludge is dewatered with the further addition of a polymer solution. The dewatered sludge falls into a sludge screw conveyor and remains in a sludge tank until it is finally utilised by an external recycling company.

The daily sampling and analysis of the various water and sludge flows provides a clear picture of the plant performance and serves as the basis for a detailed design of the future large-scale plant.