Project Details

Project Delivery

Project Results

Discussion

Situation

A producer of cut flowers in Germany operates fields, greenhouses, and an online shop to grow and sell peonies. For this, the company needs a lot of water to irrigate the plants. The customer intended to generate some of this through wastewater treatment. The company itself produces about 15 m³ of wastewater per day. For this, the customer asked for a wastewater treatment plant.

Problem

The first challenge with this project was the space required on the company premises. The client wanted an underground installation, as there was already a simple sewer system on site. The ClearFox® team was to connect the new treatment plant to this. Therefore, the treatment solution had to be particularly reliable.

The second challenge was the strict regulations regarding use for irrigation. When taking wastewater samples, the in-house laboratory of PPU found a BOD₅ of 400 mg/l on average and a COD of 700 mg/l on average. This means that the wastewater is predominantly organically polluted, which is why biological wastewater treatment was the obvious choice.

Solution

For this project, the ClearFox® team offered the customer a wastewater treatment plant with FBBR technology in below-ground concrete tanks. The engineers planned with their own concrete tanks, which they equipped with the fixed bed material and the aeration system in the main factory in Bayreuth. They delivered these ready-assembled to the customer, where they only had to be installed, connected to the sewer system, and put into operation.

The wastewater first flows into a buffer tank. Since this occurs very irregularly – the employees hardly produce any wastewater overnight or at weekends – the buffer tank enables the treatment plant to cope very well with the fluctuating wastewater loads. At regular intervals, the system pumps the wastewater into the fixed-bed reactor. This is where the biological treatment takes place. A third tank serves as storage for the sludge that accumulates. However, the system works so efficiently that the client only needs to empty the sludge storage tank very rarely.

For this project, the ClearFox® team took over the complete planning of the project, the provision of the concrete tanks, the manufacturing in the main factory, the transport to the customer, the below-ground installation, the commissioning, and the training of the employees. The fixed-bed treatment plant from PPU meets the customer’s requirements, which is why they can use their wastewater for irrigation.