How ALGAESYS works
What is ALGAESYS?
ALGAESYS is a combination of wastewater treatment and resource recovery that uses biomass to treat the water to re-use levels. It produces biomass and soil conditioners to rehabilitate poor soil by default and with large enough installations, the biomass can be further processed (via anaerobic digestion) to produce biomethane for heat or power production.
What can ALGAESYS do?
The ALGAESYS system removes nitrogen, phosphorus, carbonaceous pollutants and heavy metals, destroys persistent organics, disinfects to at least EU Class C without additional treatment and absorbs significant amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide while processing wastewater.
The inside of an ALGAESYS plant
How does the ALGAESYS system work?
Put simply, the ALGAESYS system treats wastewater in the following steps:
The wastewater is pre-treated
ALGAESYS can work for a wide variety of applications. Depending on your influent source, the water may require pre-treatment. This could be a simple as physical filtration or clarification, pH balancing or adding essential nutrients. Our team will evaluate what is required and design the plant accordingly. Regardless of your influent quality, we can adjust the plant design to match.
The ALGAE treats the water
In essence, the algae and other organisms are put into a ‘stressed state’ encouraging them to reproduce rapidly. This reproduction causes the organisms to consume the nutrient in the water, effectively treating it to Medium-Risk Reuse Standard. Additionally, the plant auto-harvests the biomass continuously as it is produced. This biomass can be used for many applications including;
As a flocculant in our pre-treatment process
As fertiliser/soil conditioner
As feed stock for anaerobic digestion
This treatment process (hydraulic retention time) is 4-8 hours making it not only effective, but fast compared to many other biological treatment processes.
(Optional) Take it further – treat to High-Risk reuse standard
Depending on your goals for water reuse, you may want to consider treating the water further. We have several options available to add to your unique plant setup to treat the water to High-Risk reuse standard. Talk to us today to discuss how ALGAESYS can design a treatment train to suit your needs.
3D Fly-through of a 3 tank plant
Tell me more about the science behind ALGAESYS
In existing wastewater treatment systems, the organic pollutants are oxidised by heterotrophic microorganisms, a process that requires energy-consuming oxygenation through aeration and costly additional process steps for the disinfection and removal of persistent organic chemicals.
ALGAESYS uses naturally occurring colonised phototrophic biomass that produce reactive oxygen species which remove pathogens and oxidise persistent organics such as trace organics, hormones, pharmaceuticals, and endocrine disruptors. They also produce extracellular polymeric substances and provide far more effective toxic shock event survival than conventional bacterial systems. These polymeric substances enable the colony that attaches to our rotating logs to become established, creating optimal conditions for maximising the efficacy of the biomass in breaking down and using the pollutants for cell growth.
The patented ALGAESYS technology has been developed and extensively demonstrated at full-scale in the USA and further optimised in China. It has now been commercially implemented in the UK, Australia and Spain.