Cleanzine: your weekly cleaning and hygiene industry newsletter 3rd July 2025 Issue no. 1169
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Lowering costs of wastewater treatment with nanobubble technology
Nanobubble technology specialist, Moleaer, will be exhibiting at WEFTEC, (Water Environment Federation's Technical Exhibition & Conference) next month, with the company's senior water process engineer, John Crisman, also presenting a paper on the ways 'Clean chemistry lowers the cost-to-treat by improving wastewater treatability and increasing capacity: a case study on nanobubble pretreatment'.
The presentation will be held on 3rd October at 16:00, as part of the Design Tools & Technologies for Preliminary & Primary Treatment professional education track.
WEFTEC is held from 30th September to 4th October this year, offering more than 150 wastewater educational sessions, and showcasing more than 800 industry-leading product, service and technology providers in the main exhibition hall.
Industries represented will include wastewater treatment, design and modelling, drinking water, and water reuse and reclamation.
Moleaer's presentation will focus on how nanobubble pre-treatment is enabling municipal Water Resource Recovery Facilities (WRRF) to improve treatment efficiency and process intensification, by removing inhibitory compounds commonly found in influent streams. These compounds consist of fats, oils and grease (FOG) and surfactants, which disrupt wastewater treatment by coating the surface of water, bubbles, solids and biomass. This impedes oxygen transfer, interferes with separation, inhibits biological processes like nitrification, and increases chemical demand, making commonly applied wastewater treatment processes inherently inefficient and more costly than necessary.
Preliminary and primary treatment process design may not be as exciting as advanced biological process design, but without effective preliminary/primary treatment systems, advanced downstream processes are doomed to fail, says the company. Far from traditional methods, innovative and far more effective approaches have recently been developed. Some technologies - like that from Moleaer - don't require design changes and can be easily and cost-effectively integrated with existing processes.
The education track will present three technologies or design approaches that improve significantly on traditional outcomes. Case studies of the technologies will be presented, highlighting lessons learned.
In his session, John Crisman will share process and data specifics from California's Goleta Sanitary District case study using Moleaer's technology, allowing the WRRF to:
* significantly reduce odours, foam and septicity
* increase secondary treatment process intensification by 20%
* increase primary clarifier solids removal by 10%
* reduce aeration energy power draw by 43%, and
* reduce chlorine consumption by 44%.
By the track's end, attendees will be able to recognise innovative approaches to designing preliminary and primary treatment processes, identify potential benefits of these new methods, and apply the lessons learned from presented case studies.
Moleaer will also offer two free, live webinars the week preceding WEFTEC, for those who wish to explore the applications and economics of nanobubble pretreatment. Webinars entitled 'The Future of Wastewater Treatment: How nanobubbles improve treatment efficiency and reduce costs' will be held on 27th September at 10:00 Pacific Daylight Time, and on 28th September 16:00 Central European Time.
John Crisman and Andrea White, Moleaer's global director of water process engineering, will share the nature of new challenges facing WRRFs today, and how Moleaer's unique technology can help overcome them, using only air and water.
28th September 2023