INNOVATION AND ENERGY CONSERVATION SUCCESS STORY
CWE’s Celebrates Increased Capacity thanks to our re-engineered Vacom Evaporator, now on-line at our Mansfield facility.
CWE is thrilled to announce a powerful duo of evaporators currently on-line at our Mansfield facility. Our 1st-generation evaporator, a Vacom unit, joins our 2nd-generation evaporator, a Niro unit, already in service at the location, allowing us to process even more wastewater more efficiently.
Our Vacom has recently come back on-line in Mansfield after a much-needed, complete re-engineering effort, while our Niro has been our workhorse in Mansfield for the past 3 years. The Niro is 2nd-gen machine, which means it’s bigger, with a more efficient design. We refurbished the Niro in early 2018 by giving it a thorough maintenance overhaul with a few new parts, where needed.
As we set our sights on running the two machines simultaneously, the result is essentially a doubling of our process throughput capacity. What the CWE engineers discovered is that the older Vacom could be re-engineered to run just like the newer Niro. Our clever designers retrofitted and remade the older Vacom to use exactly the same parts as the Niro. Win/win: we now have interchangeable parts for two different generation machines and only need to carry one inventory for spare parts. The Vacom is now running much more efficiently than in its original state (essentially we made our Gen1 machine as efficient as our Gen2 machine). We’re incredibly proud of our engineering team for brainstorming this set-up. In our case 1+1 = 3.
We’re excited about this duo because thermal processing of wastewater is sometimes the ONLY way to remove exotic, specific contaminants from wastewater. The other methods for separating water from its contaminants are chemical, filtration, and biological. Each of these has its limitations and some methods can only be used in certain situations. Often the thermal option is energy-intensive, but our evaporator technology is actually very energy-efficient because we recycle the heat energy. How? We re-use the evaporated water from the system to heat the next cycle’s incoming waste. A quick review of the process of thermal recompression waste evaporation might be helpful here. As wastewater enters our system, we heat that material and run it over a very hot piece of ceramic or metal. The water boils off as steam (evaporation). The solids are left behind in the form of concentrates and are then disposed of.
In our system, the steam gets re-compressed and moved back into the heat exchanger to heat the next cycle of wastewater coming into the system. It’s a closed loop, extremely efficient process. We minimize the use of our boiler to heat water from ambient temperature because so much thermal energy is already available in the system. This engineering conserves energy — something we’re very proud of.
The value to our customer base and new prospects in the Mansfield area is that we can now handle a much higher volume of wastewater due to our newly doubled capacity.
We’re not stopping there, though. Our goal is evaporative treatment in the future on a larger, more sophisticated scale. Two innovations on the horizon for us are:
- In Mansfield…ultrafiltration: pre-filtering the liquids prior to evaporation would improve the efficiency of the evaporators and further increase our wastewater treatment capacity twofold yet again.
- In Dayton…the addition of a very robust evaporator (superfast, complex, and capable of handling hazardous waste).
CWE has state-of-the-art evaporative wastewater processing available now with more exciting developments to come. Call us for any of your wastewater needs in the Dayton or Mansfield areas.