Location: Asia
Application: Industrial MBR
Capacity: 6,700 m3/day
Membrane: 8 mm, PVDF, non-backwashable
Product: Tubular UF membrane modules
A large petroleum and petrochemical company in Southeast Asia produces liquified petroleum gas (for cooking), gasoline, diesel and other products from crude oil via fractionation. In order to minimize its environmental impact and to protect the health and natural resources of the surrounding area, the company built a centralized wastewater treatment plant to treat the discharge from all of its various petrochemical and petroleum processing facilities.
The company planned the central wastewater treatment plant (CWTP) to be built on a parcel of land measuring 528,000 m2 and located in its own industrial zone. A small CWTP facility already existed on the property but was much smaller in scale. The company therefore decided to build a larger, more advanced treatment facility over the course of about 2,5 years.
The new CWTP would take four heavy-loaded feed streams from various manufacturing processes. Three of these streams are directed to a Corrugated Plate Interceptor (CPI) separator unit, then pass through a tank. The waste gas from each of these three units is then sent to an odor treatment system, dissolved air flotation (DAF) unit, and into an equalization for neutralization.
The fourth stream is the UHV wastewater which stems from the company’s “Upstream Project for Hygiene and Value Added Products”, the process of using petrochemical / petroleum residue as the raw material to produce propylene gas that can be further used for making housewares or other goods. This UHV wastewater stream is sent directly to the equalization tank where it settles with the other three streams, and then all are directed to the plant’s membrane bioreactor (MBR) which features an aeration tank and a tubular UF system from Berghof Membranes (image 1).
The Berghof Membranes UF system was designed with 6 loops – each loop having 6 modules in series. Given the plant’s size, Berghof modules were installed and are operating at a crossflow velocity of 3.8 m/s, which translates to maximized performance of the system. Below is a table detailing the influent and effluent characteristics of the UF system.
The winning project ensured the end-user that discharge limits were met. The ultrafiltration was installed with a minimum amount of civil work. In contrast to the Conventional Activated Sludge treatment, the new plant makes chemical pretreatment unnecessary. As a result the end-user saves on both CAPEX and footprint. In addition, the fewer steps in pretreatment result in less energy consumption of the total plant. The higher concentration rates of biomass due to external filtration ensures a healthier and highly specialized biology in the bioreactor, thus the biological process can digest more waste and remove the slowly biodegradable matter. As a result, the effluent quality improves, less waste is left in the sludge and the end-user saves on disposal costs.
| Parameter | Influent Quality | Effluent Quality | Effluent Requirement |
|---|---|---|---|
| pH | 6.0 – 8.5 | 6.5 – 7.5 | 5.5 – 9.0 |
| COD (mg/L) | 1,200 – 1,500 | < 30 | ≤ 120 |
| BOD, mg/l | 600 | < 5 | ≤ 20 |
| TDS, mg/l | 2,000 | 2,200 | ≤ 3,000 |
| TKN, mg/l | < 50 | < 10 | ≤ 100 |
| SS, mg/l | 100 | < 3 | ≤ 50 |
| O&G, mg/l | 100 – 2,000 | < 2 | ≤ 5 |
| Phenol, mg/l | 50 | < 0.2 | 1 |
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