PFAS ISSUE
Growing concern over widespread PFAS contamination
PFAS are a group of man-made chemicals needed in many consumer products, but they cause harmful health effects in humans due to their difficulty in being broken down and tendency to accumulate in the body
Major exposure pathways include drinking water and/or eating food that has been washed with contaminated water
Water contamination may occur as a result of ground water pollution from nearby manufacturing facilities, landfills, military facilities, and airports that use aqueous film-forming foam to fight chemical fires, as well as secondary pollution through recycling the PFAS-contaminated water at wastewater treatment facilities
Dairy Wastewater
A typical wastewater effluent from a dairy plant
Biochemical oxygen demand (BOD), with an average ranging from 0.8 to 2.5 (kg/t) of milk in the untreated effluent
Chemical oxygen demand (COD), which is normally about 1.5 times the BOD level
Total suspended solids (TSS), at 100–1,000 milligrams per liter (mg/l)
Total dissolved solids (TDS): phosphorus (10–100 mg/l), and nitrogen (about 6% of the BOD level).
Conventional wastewater treatment is to treat the water so it is able to be discharged to a sewage system for further treatment
Physical - chemical treatment: simplified treatment by adding more chemicals but does not reduce the BOD load
Chemical - biological treatment: Reduced BOD/COD load but hard for varied wastewater from different products and longer processing time, significant land field, and large amount of energy
Filtration and Membrane technology: able to clean the wastewater but not suitable for highly varied and concentrated contaminants, especially in high flowrate
No single one process suitable for various dairy wastewater
CompRex Solution
In CompRex’s system, the feed stream is first heated and pressurized to near supercritical condition (3200 psi and 705º F). Due to the nonpolar nature of water in this state, inorganic salt contaminants naturally precipitate. The water then passes through a metal oxide catalyst, which allows the organic contaminants to oxidize and decompose in a chemical reaction. The salty solution collects at the bottom of the system as brine, while the cleaned water is removed from the top. CompRex’s new process mitigates the need for pretreatment and is suitable for all kinds of wastewater in a dairy plant. CompRex’s solution provides a much smaller footprint and is easy to scale up or down while maintaining the same effectiveness.
CompRex’s solution decomposes PFAS while cleaning the wastewater
CompRex’s solution to address issues that challenge the use of SCWO in dairy wastewater treatment:
Remove precipitated salts prior to deposition to mitigate the salts deposition, clogging and fouling
Efficient reaction from patent pending reactor design
High energy recovery efficiency from compact heat exchangers
Utilizing heat of the reaction to mitigate the operation cost
Diffusion bonded Inconel reactor to address corrosion issue
CompRex is in a unique position in developing and commercializing SCWO process with a diffusion bonded Inconel reactor reaching high efficiency
CompRex’s SCWO technology is able to address currently unmet needs for the PFAS removal and wastewater treatment with multibillion dollar markets. Our novel purification process enables unprecedented reductions in size and cost while achieving unparalleled efficiency and flexibility. The process has been proven successful at demonstration scale, and CompRex’s capable and experienced team has laid out a solid path towards realizing its commercial potential with the support of partners and customers.