Effluent treatment

Details Effluent treatment Effluent treatment

1992-01-07

1994-05-03

McCarthy, Neil

Liquid purification or separation

Processes

Making an insoluble substance or accreting suspended...

210727, B03D 102

Patent

active

053084993

DESCRIPTION:

BRIEF SUMMARY
This invention relates to a new effluent treatment process. More specifically, the invention is concerned with the separation of the organic material in aqueous industrial effluents by flotation to leave a treated liquid effluent, and a concentrated sludge containing the unwanted contaminants.
Aqueous industrial effluents containing high concentrations of organic compounds include sewage effluents, paper and pulp mill effluents, leachates from chemical waste land fills, wool scour effluents and effluents from water clarification processes such as the "Sirofloc" process which is described in Australian Patent No. 512,553. The disposal of these effluents usually involves direct discharge to a water course, sewer or land. However, environmental considerations now demand some form of additional treatment to remove the pollutants.
The success of any effluent treatment process will be based on concentration, that is, the extent to which the contaminants are separated into a low volume phase ("sludge") thereby recovering as much of the water as possible. The quality of the recovered water should be at least sufficient to recirculate this as feedwater. Disposal of the relatively small volume of sludge can then be achieved more easily and cheaply.
A wide range of possible treatment methods are conventionally considered. These include removal techniques such as coagulation, precipitation, adsorption and filtration, as well as destructive techniques such as oxidation and biological processes. Commonly economic evaluation of the most promising options determined that treatment with alum or ferric coagulants was likely to be the cheapest method.
Foam separation techniques have been used for many years to remove traces of heavy metal ions from industrial effluents. Adsorbing colloid flotation has now been developed and involves the addition of a high surface area solid onto which the heavy metal ions can adsorb. The loaded substrate is then removed by addition of a surfactant and the injection of a gas, usually air. The substrate is usually aluminium or ferric hydroxide which is generated in-situ and the surfactant employed is anionic. The technique has been applied to a wide range of waters and wastewaters with a variety of metal ions.
The techniques of pressure flotation or dissolved air flotation (DAF) is commonly used in water purification. The lack of industrial acceptance of this technique is probably due to economic factors related to the high operating costs of the DAF plants. However, the potential value of DAF for potable water treatment, particularly for raw waters with high algal populations, is now recognised and indications are that it is competitive with conventional sedimentation processes.
For sewage effluents, the activated sludge process is widely used to reduce biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), but requires long residence times and large plants with high capital and operating costs. Biological methods such as the activated sludge process have long been favoured over physico-chemical methods for economic reasons. However, a variation of the "Sirofloc" process for water clarification has been shown to satisfactorily treat such effluents with the promise of smaller, cheaper plants. This process which is described in Australian Patent Specification No. 79700/87 uses magnetite to rapidly clarify the sewage effluent with the production of a sewage concentrate some 30 to 40 times more concentrated than the original.
Despite interest in the use of flotation in the treatment of sewage and sewage effluents, the technique is primarily used in the thickening of excess activated sludge as a means of assisting overloaded plants.
The use of metallurgical flotation techniques in the recovery of wool grease from wool scour effluents has also been described in L. F. Evans and W. E. Ewers, Australian Journal of Applied Science, Vol 4, 552-58 (1953).
We have now found that the combination of a coagulant and a mixture of a cationic polymer or copolymer with an anionic surfactant, a non-ionic surfactant or both can be used

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patent: 4948512 (1990-08-01), Gotlieb et al.
patent: 5009792 (1991-04-01), Pettersen et al.

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