First European Aeration Systems based on NANOBUBBLES TECHNOLOGY for Waste Water Treatment

Project Information

WATERMAX

Grant agreement ID: 855523

DOI

10.3030/855523

Project closed

EC signature date 18 January 2019

Start date 1 February 2019

End date 31 July 2019

Funded under

• INDUSTRIAL LEADERSHIP - Innovation In SMEs

Total cost

€ 71 429,00

EU contribution

€ 50 000,00

Coordinated by

LUNA SRL
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - WATERMAX (First European Aeration Systems based on NANOBUBBLES TECHNOLOGY for Waste Water Treatment)

Reporting period: 2019-02-01 to 2019-07-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The main problem of the public and private organizations operating in the WWT (Waste Water Treatment) sector is high cost for managing the treatment plants, lot of them very obsolete in many European countries. Old plants’ are less effective due to the very scarce efficiency of the out-dated aeration systems, needed for the oxygenation of the biological reactions and for the final clarification. The cost per unit of Oxygen introduced into wastewater (KgO2) by those up-dated types of systems is very high both in terms of operating and capital expense due to:
- High operating costs, including i) electricity consumed by the aerators, which is about 50% of the overall consumption of the entire plant and, ii) system maintenance and monitoring costs.
- High upgrade costs for plants requiring more oxygen than current aeration systems can produce; the upgrade is necessary to increase the treatment capacity, in the very frequent case of increased waste flows with respect to the initial design characteristics. Upgrade projects based on current technologies require heavy technical intervention and costs, sometimes with the need of stopping the plant operations to empty the pools.
- High installation costs of traditional aeration systems on the market, especially the models with diffusers placed in the bottom of the tanks.
With the aim of analysing new business opportunities and application of the Nanobubble technology, the relevant problem of water disinfection has been addressed and analysed during the project. The first studies have been conducted for effectively introducing the Ozone for disinfection of the drinking water in the Animal Farming industry. The quality of drinking water is of fundamental importance in livestock and plays an important role in the transmission of some bacterial, viral and protozoan diseases, with negative impacts in terms of animal health and industrial costs:
- Bad quality water (usually coming from boreholes) brings farmers to use huge quantities of antibiotics resulting in a worst quality of the product and stress for the animals. That kind of water produces in all pipes a thick mass of biofilm which releases large amounts of bacteria and other harmful elements into the drinking system. Farmers usually use chemical solutions for removal of biofilm (peroxide or chlorine); antibiotics plus residuals in the water of the chemical additives have a strong negative impact on animal wellness and on the production (quantity and quality of meats). Moreover lots of chemical products are used for cleaning/disinfecting animals (for instance the cow feet for avoiding contamination of milk), also affects animals health. Water used in meat processing is normally disinfected with chlorine and antibiotics, and some residuals of them always remain in the meat itself.
- Current “ozone based” solutions on the market are very expensive as they are based on the use of ozone for water treatment, the as ozone injected in water in the form of normal bubbles is very volatile: large part of it return to atmosphere without any effect on the water to be treated. It has been proven that 10% of ozone provided by a conventional “blower” is useful (it is dissolved into the water) while the remaining 90% is lost.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The aeration technology bases on Nanobubbles has been successfully tested and used in Japan and in the US with many different applications. Among these the most promising for the European market are certainly:
a) New aeration systems for Wastewater treatment.
Biological Wastewater Treatment in urban and industrial plants requires to transfer to water a high level of dissolved oxygen (DO) to speed up biological reactions, thus reducing BOD/COD and Ammonia (NH3) to values below thresholds set by EC regulations. To maintain the required O2 concentration in wastewater, bubbles of air (or pure oxygen) are injected into the biological treatment tank by powerful Aerators (usually compressors or turbines).
The effectiveness of ozone in water disinfection has been demonstrated in several domain, including the purification of drinking water. The problem is the extreme “volatility” of that gas which bubbles remain dissolved in water for few seconds and quickly is dispersed into the atmosphere. Transferring in form of Nanobubbles, it’s possible to maximize the amount of ozone dissolved into water and to increase its resilience. For reaching these results, the solution is the adoption of a NanoBubble Generator (NBG) which transfers to water NBs of gas produced by a small Ozone generator. That device allows to dissolve into the drinking water a larger quantity of Ozone (in comparison to normal bubbles) exploiting the unique characteristics of gas Nanobubbles into water: high resilience (Nanobubbles don’t blows and last for days), efficiency of transferring gas NB into water (around 90%, only 10% is lost in the atmosphere) and high transfer rate (due to the high exchange surface of NBs for unit of gas in comparison with bigger bubbles).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

1) To increase their capacity of treating Waste Waters, both environmental Utilities and Industries are looking for new solutions able to lower the costs of the treatment processes, especially those related to water aeration in the biological processes. Moreover many operators urgently need novel and effective solutions that could quickly allow, with limited investments, to upgrade the aeration capacity into their obsolete treatment plants. New and more efficient aeration systems should be installed in old plants without having to shut-down and empty them. This scenario represents a first huge business opportunity, since LUNA srl is the first company in Europe who developed and tested a revolutionary aeration system, based on NB technology, which demonstrated in real conditions the capability to aerate huge flows of WWT, with a very low cost and time of operation (one day installation and low maintenance), very low investments and immediate results.
2) In the huge world of animal farming, cattle (calf and milk cows) and poultry (chickens, turkeys) are the most affected by the bad quality of drinking water and of the excess of antibiotics. As far as cattle is concerned, according to Eurostat (2018) there are 3.300.000 farms in Europe (87 million animals), where a large number of them are owned by 47.000 medium-big size groups (more than >500 animals).
Regarding poultry farming, in the EU around 8.9 billion animals are breed. Annual production in the overall EU are up 25% since 2010 and is still fast growing. Over the past 10 years, global demand for chicken has steadily increased and EU’s poultry breeders have become huge production groups with large number of factory farms. Farms with more than 10,000 broilers are the 1% of the total number of broiler farms (more than 500.000) in the EU. It means than 5.000 large groups and farms account for more than 90% of the production.

Nanobubble Generator working into a WWT plant