Are You Over-Treating Your Water? Discover Optimization

Randy Fuller, industrial applications development manager with Hach Company, relates some common operational mistakes at wastewater treatment plants, and how they can be remedied.

Hach Company is one of the most recognizable names in water and wastewater treatment, specializing in water analysis testing equipment. They know their business and their industry – and here’s how Randy Fuller of Hach describes the current trend:

“Over the past couple of years, the need for optimization … has started to rise to the top. As time goes on in our industry, cost is always of utmost importance.

“To not over-treat the water and to control the cost of the final product, we need to make sure that we put in place those types of instrumentation that allow us to achieve optimization, to cut back on over-chemical usage in a lot of our processes.”

Fuller was asked for a true-to-life example of optimization at work, and specifically the benefit of real-time monitoring.

“Let’s just take sludge dewatering, for example. …The last thing you want to do is to pay to haul water off to the landfill, or wherever you dispose of the sludge that comes out of it. You have to add chemicals into that wastewater, to actually get the sludge … to get the particles to drop out and to take the water out of it.”

Fuller continued: “A lot of times, we overfeed a lot of those chemicals, just to make sure that we have the right amount in there. [Hach’s] new RTC process will allow us to optimize the amount of polymers that we put into the sample to get those solids to drop out, and so that we can optimize our process of taking the water out and only hauling the solids away from the wastewater treatment plant.”

That’s just one example. As Fuller states, “Optimization for online water monitoring and for processing of water – whether it be industrial, drinking water, wastewater – it’s a journey.”

For more words of wisdom and lessons in optimization, tune in below.