Case Study: Fountain Hills Combines Cloth Media Filtration With Membrane System To Get Reuse Quality Effluent At An Economical Cost!

The Fountain Hills Sanitary District WWTP was first constructed in Fountain Hills, Arizona in 1974 and received an aggressive upgrade in November of 1999. The plant was in need of an upgrade because the original treatment equipment had reached the end of its life expectancy, and the tremendous growth and changing environmental regulations called for it. Fountain Hills' secondary and tertiary treatment processes all required expansion or retrofit. The upgrade included the replacement of 16 submersible mixers with 4 AquaDDM® direct-drive mixers in the plant's two anoxic basins and the use of a MixAir® system in the 2 aerobic digesters. The two aeration basins, which made up the plant's secondary treatment process, continue to be utilized. In order to produce reuse quality effluent for the growing community and meet more stringent environmental regulations at an economical cost, Fountain Hills opted to also upgrade the tertiary process by combining two state-of-the-art filtration systems. This filtration combination consists of 3 AquaDisk® cloth media filters and a Pall Microza® hollow-fiber microfiltration membrane system.

Fountain Hills' new wastewater treatment facility was up and running in February 2001. The new system produces effluent quality far exceeding conventional methods, and with a low life cycle cost.

The reclaimed effluent produced by the AquaDisk cloth media filters is used for park and golf course irrigation, and to fill Fountain Lake, which exhibits the highest fountain in the USA. A portion of the filters' effluent is also distributed to the membrane system to produce microfiltered effluent for injection into deep wells for ground water recharge. This allows 2.0 MGD of water to be stored when the demand for water is low (i.e. winter) and have it available when the demand is high (i.e. summer).

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