Evaporation technologies for wastewater treatment, water reuse and zero liquid discharge (ZLD), waste volume and disposal cost reduction, and by-products recovery.
Overview
Evaled — a Veolia Water Technologies subsidiary — offers a family of effective solutions for water reuse and zero liquid discharge (ZLD), waste volume and disposal cost reduction, and effluent treatment for industrial water and wastewater treatment.
These solutions help our customers from across many markets including pharmaceutical and cosmetics, chemical, food and beverage and more to protect their operations from wastewater management issues and the associated business continuity risks by facilitating water recycling, reuse and valuable matter (by-product) recovery while meeting tightening environmental regulations.
How Evaled evaporation technologies work
Vacuum evaporation process is a wastewater treatment method that separates water from contaminants with high boiling points. Wastewater is then fed into a boiling chamber and heated until the water molecules turn into vapor. Contaminants are left behind while the vapor is collected, cooled and condensed through a heat exchanger. The whole system works in vacuum conditions so the wastewater boils at lower temperatures.
Vacuum evaporation can be combined with other processes, such as reverse osmosis, to create a complete wastewater treatment system making it suitable for treating and/or recycling wastewater across a range of industries.
Evaled evaporators are standard and modular units with different reliable heat transfer technologies and sizes to better meet individual needs. The units have a low energy consumption and low carbon footprint owing to high automation processes, are ISO 9001/2018 quality certified and are able to treat even the most aggressive effluents.
Features and benefits
- Efficiency and simplicity: excellent quality of the distillate produced, suitable for factory multi-purpose reuse; high level of concentration of the polluting fraction for significant reduction of disposal costs.
- Waste-to-energy water treatment by-product seperation provides an effective alternative energy option to reduce energy costs, CO2 emissions and replace fossil fuels.
- Reliability and cost-effectiveness: low maintenance requirements and energy consumption.
- Versatility: can treat feed water with little or no pretreatment, including hazardous and difficult streams.
- Zero liquid discharge (ZLD): distillate can be recovered and recycled as process water (when possible) or for other factory purposes, helping plants meet discharge obligations and providing a potential income or saving source.
- Component recovery: valuable materials can be separated or recycled, including precious metals or Active Pharmaceutical Ingredients (API).
- Eco-friendliness: low carbon footprint. This allows us to meet and exceed the discharge limits required by local environmental legislation.
Applications
Services
We offer a range of services from maintenance contracts and chemicals to guarantee extensions, lab analysis, and in-stock spare parts and consumables products.
Resources and product range
Evaled™ PC: heat pump evaporation
The heat pump vacuum evaporation family is known for its flexibility, low energy consumption and reliability. It controls problematic foaming phenomena, allowing total separation of metals and surfactants, giving a high-yield and quality in terms of distillate, with a significant reduction of COD.
Evaled™ AC
AC is the Evaled evaporator family that takes advantage of excess hot water or steam readily available from co-generation or cooling plants. It is able to handle a variety of wastewater and, thanks to the forced circulation, reduction of fouling and scaling phenomena is achievable.
Evaled™ RV
The RV solution represents the range of mechanical vapor recompression (MVR) for industrial wastewater treatment. It’s ideal when large quantities of waste have to be treated. The low running costs enable installation of plants whose return on investment can often be measured in months.
Quote
There is a very large focus on reuse in the industrial sector but also in finding other ways to think about wastewater as a resource. One way for sure is evaporation and crystallization technologies which recover until the very last drop. Evaporation is starting to be considered not only as the ultimate treatment step to achieve zero liquid discharge plants but it can also be applied inside the production line. In doing so, wastewater streams can be reused inside the production process itself.
Cristina Del Piccolo
Chief Technical Officer
Contact Cristina through her LinkedIn account
FAQ about Evaled
What is zero liquid discharge (ZLD)?
"Zero liquid discharge is a configuration in a process line that doesn’t produce any liquid stream to be disposed out of the treatment. In this configuration the liquid streams coming from the treatment are normally reused and the final residue is in a state different from the liquid one, so in a semi-solid/solid state. Evaporation/crystallization is the main technology to apply when ZLD is required, because it allows to push the recoveries and concentrations beyond the other conventional technologies. In a ZLD plant it is quite normal to have a pre-concentration step with membranes, and to further treat the membranes brine with evaporation and crystallization technologies"
How do evaporation technologies facilitate water reuse?
“Evaporation technologies are separation technologies and normally produce a distillate, the treated water and a concentrate, the residue. During the process, the majority of pollutants such as salinity and ions, metals, suspended solids, remain in the concentrate leaving the distillate clean. The quality which normally characterized the distillate makes it possible to find a use for this stream either to be reused in the production process or as utility. When the quality of the treated stream is lower as applying other treatment technologies different from evaporation, the reuse is difficult because of the potential build-up of some pollutants or because of the concentrations of some compounds which is not compatible with the reuse..”
What are the challenges associated with industrial wastewater treatment?
“For sure the variability because even wastewater coming from the same industry and same application can be very different one from the other. Secondly, another difficulty comes from the high concentrations that some pollutants may reach. Both challenges are very well faced and solved by evaporation technologies which is the most suitable process for highly concentrated streams and is one of the most flexible technologies in the panorama of water treatment processes available. Evaporation can be applied to remove both salinity and organic compounds, both biodegradable and hard type, metals, suspended solids, and can accept concentration which are a limit for other processes.”
Case studies
A global leader in the development, manufacturing and sale of veterinary medicines required an effective solution for the treatment of large quantities of wastewater containing active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) that are not permitted for environmental discharge. They had 13,400 cubic meters per year — 61 tonnes per day based on 220 operational days — of wastewater to manage in line with regulatory requirements. We provided the customer with three Evaled RVF40FF evaporator units of 40 tonnes per day each. They generally just use two units but having the backup is the way we guarantee that they can meet their daily peak, ensure business continuity and maintain compliance with discharge limits. We also have a service contract with the customer covering the blower, which is the heart of the unit.
The client is a leading global provider of comprehensive photovoltaic (PV) solar systems. They wanted to reduce disposal costs and achieve zero liquid discharge (ZLD) via water reuse. We supplied five RVF 60 evaporators (in different sites) for the treatment of wastewater from the production of the photovoltaic systems to achieve ZLD.
he client is the world’s leading lithium minerals concentrate producer. Their site has open-cut mining pits for spodumene (lithium mineral). They needed to legally ensure they did not discharge any lithium into groundwater from the mining process. We supplied three RVF 60 and four ACR 12 evaporators for the wastewater treatment and achieved a separation of 94% and zero lithium discharged in the environment.
