Achievements

Waste water treatment units

Energy gains in the wine industry

For nearly 90 years, our French Client has been internationally recognized for its production of wines and spirits. Among its specialties are whisky, rum, wine, and various traditional French spirits. This success is based on the mastery and continuous improvement of numerous skills and processes such as distillation. As a result, this industry requires a significant volume of cleaning water and consequently involves the use and discharge of large amounts of water, especially for cleaning equipment. To improve the management of their industrial effluents, our Client contacted us to develop a coagulating-flocculating complex tailored to the type of contaminants present in their process waters.

Increasing production capacity while considering wastewater treatment

The client company plans to double the capacity of its whisky distillery. Currently, the distillate is treated by a vacuum evaporator, but to limit its energy consumption and simplify the treatment of its industrial wastewater, our Client wishes to use our services to add a physico-chemical treatment process using a powdered coagulation and flocculation product. As part of its “reuse” policy and aiming for water savings, our Client wants to reuse all or part of the 50m3 of production washing water it generates per hour.

A custom coagulant formulation

Result after the flocculation of cleaning water from wine production equipment
Result after the flocculation of cleaning water from wine production equipment

Our client sent us a sample of their wastewater so we could develop the best formula to address their issue. The client’s dirty water was characterized by high acidity with a pH close to 3.6. Additionally, we observed a significant concentration of copper (2.08 mg/L), iron (1.58 mg/L), zinc (3.01 mg/L), and particularly phosphorus (342.00 mg/L). The goal of our treatment based on the principle of flocculation was to design a reagent capable of increasing this pH and reducing the concentrations of heavy metals and phosphorus, so that the properties of the treated water would meet the prevailing standards. After several sampling campaigns to refine our coagulant formulation, we achieved in a 5-minute interval a light-yellow solution with a pH close to 8 and low metal concentrations (0.12 mg/L of copper, 0.17 mg/L of iron, 0.46 mg/L of zinc, and 63.80 mg/L of phosphorus). Moreover, our single-reactant coagulant-flocculant generates a sludge volume to be disposed of amounting to 3% of the initial water volume to be treated.

Visually, the results are also very convincing, transforming from a brown and cloudy solution to an almost translucent solution.

Towards a less energy-intensive solution

Thanks to the development of our coagulant-flocculant formula tailored to the specific needs of our Client’s effluents, we were able to offer our Client a physico-chemical process that remains simple to use and maintain, with relatively short reaction times and low reagent dosages. Compared to the currently used vacuum evaporation, this represents a proven gain in terms of operational simplicity, maintenance, and upkeep, as well as energy savings. The efficiency of our flocculant reagent also makes it possible to consider recycling the water from the distillation process. This is not only an economic advancement, as water management costs are reduced, but above all an environmental advancement for the wine industry, which remains one of the largest water-consuming industries.