Articles
Case Study: Orange County SWRF Utilizes 8 AquaDisk® Filters To Assist In Meeting Its Multi-faceted Reuse Program
January 19, 2005
Orange County South Water Reclamation Facility (North Plant) in Orlando, Florida is one of three plants servicing over 113,000 people between unincorporated Orange County and cities of Belle Isle and Edgewood. All the treated wastewater from the County's three facilities is reclaimed and is dedicated to many uses: to irrigate citrus groves and golf courses, create wetlands for endangered species, recharge the freshwater Aquifer, and to provide cooling water to Orlando Utility Commission's Stanton Energy Center.
Orange County SWRF began its operation in 1957 with a 1.0 MGD trickling filter treatment system and it has experienced several expansions and upgrades since in order to accommodate the community's growth and increasingly stringent effluent requirements. The upgrades included the addition of an extended aeration process, sludge processing systems, more aeration tanks, a three-pass, modified step-feed process and four large clarifiers with return activated sludge systems. The plant added (4) AquaABF® sand filters in 1992 for tertiary filtration to reduce TSS. In October 2003, (8) packaged steel 12-disk AquaDisk® cloth media filters were installed in a portion of the existing traveling bridge sand filter tanks. The AquaDisk® filters provided a 60% increase in average hydraulic capacity on the basis of flow per square foot of filtration area. The cloth media filters precede chlorine contact tanks in the plant's treatment scheme.
The AquaDisk® cloth media filters offer the plant additonal loading capacity with a smaller footprint. This is a key feature of the unique pile cloth filter media, which allows higher hydraulic and solids loading rates than conventional granular media, resulting in up to 75% less land requirement. The operators at Orange County SWRF have been pleased with the cloth media filters' performance and say, "the filters have handled flows in excess of design while maintaining effluent quality and have shown to be much easier to maintain than the sand filters they replaced."
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