How ALGAESYS works
What is ALGAESYS?
ALGAESYS is a combination of wastewater treatment and resource recovery that uses bio-mass to treat the water to a re-use level. It produces biomass, bio-methane (for energy production or compression), and soil conditioners to rehabilitate poor soil.
What can ALGAESYS do?
The ALGAESYS system removes nitrogen, phosphorus and carbonaceous pollutants and heavy metals, destroys persistent organics, disinfects to at least EU Class C without additional treatment, and absorbs approximately 1015 grams of atmospheric carbon dioxide per cubic meter of wastewater treated.
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 will require certain pre-treatment to prepare it for treatment. This could be a simple as physical filtration or clarification, or it could require pH balancing or adding essential nutrients for example. 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 placed into a ‘stressed state’ which encourages them to reproduce rapidly. This reproduction process causes the organisms to consume the waste part of the water, thus treating it to EU Class C standard. Additionally, the stressed organisms then drop off into our collection hoppers, ready to be used as biomass. This biomass can be used for many applications including;
As a flocculant in our pre-treatment process,
As fertiliser, or
As animal feed
This treatment process occurs in 4-8 hours, compared to existing biological wastewater treatment systems which take typically at least 48 hours.
(Optional) Take it further – treat to EU Class A Standard
Depending on your goal 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 EU Class A 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 and is currently being implemented in Western Australia and Europe.