Compressed Air Best Practices - November 2008 - (Page 30) | 11–12/08 Focus Industry STEEL & METALS | T U B U L A R M E M B R A N E S H A N D L E O I LY W A S T E W AT E R AT METALDYNE Unfortunately, the tubular membranes in the MBR had difficulty handling the oils and greases, resulting in clogged pores in as little as three weeks. A scum, with a consistency of a foamy milkshake, formed on the top of the bioreactor tanks, often overflowing onto the floor. The die lube, which accounted for approximately 80% of the waste stream, seemed to be the source of the problem. “Uncontrolled wasting from the biological tank caused a mess and it became extremely expensive to haul away all of the waste,” said Cleary. “We were hauling over 120 truckloads of bioreactor waste each year, at an annual cost of nearly a quarter of a million dollars. We knew that we needed to find an effective way to prefilter the feed water to the MBR in order to remove the oil and other components that were wreaking havoc on the MBR system.” “We were hauling over 120 truckloads of bioreactor waste each year, at an annual cost of nearly a quarter of a ” million dollars. FEG™ Tubular Membranes Cleary and his team worked with almost two dozen vendors to test a wide variety of pretreatment solutions, utilizing many different types of membranes. For example, a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy funded the testing of a spinning membrane system. The system worked effectively, but it was not commercially available and high electricity costs made the system uneconomical. “A few years ago, we heard that a new tubular membrane was developed by Koch Membrane Systems that could handle extremely difficult oily wastewater, and indeed it proved effective,” says Cleary. “Finally, we had a system capable of removing the solids upstream of our bioreactor.” In 2006, the Twinsburg plant installed a KONSOLIDATOR™ 150 Industrial Wastewater System from Koch Membrane Systems Inc. (KMS) of Wilmington, Mass. The pre-engineered, pre-packaged system contains 150 FEG™ PLUS tubular UF membranes. KMS tubular membranes have an open channel configuration capable of handling extremely high suspended solids loads. They are well suited to applications in heavy industrial wastes including oily wastewaters and can be cleaned mechanically using spongeballs. The FEG PLUS membranes are rated at 120,000 dalton molecular weight cutoff (MWCO), roughly equivalent to a membrane pore size of 0.02 microns [Figure 2]. Figure 2 30 www.airbestpractices.com http://www.airbestpractices.com
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