Objective
A large amount of wastewater in the form of oil-in-water is generated in different industries such as olive mills, metal processing and offshore oil and gas. The wastewater treatment equipment market was worth >€1 billion in 2010. All the industries face the same problems: to separate emulsified oil from water in a cost-effective way and to handle large volumes of oily waste in an economical way. Among available technologies membrane processes exhibit undisputable advantages over the conventional approaches, especially in treatment of highly emulsified oily wastewater.
The O-WaR project aims to develop an integrated process able to efficiently remove emulsified oil from wastewater, to reuse treated water, to recover by-products in wastewater and to reduce volumes of oily waste for disposal. Our solution consists of a SiC membrane coated with an anti-fouling layer, an Induced Gas Flotation (IGF) unit for membrane concentrate treatment and a NF/RO unit for purification of SiC permeate and/or valuable by-products recovery from wastewater.
The O-WaR technology will be able to remove >99% of oil, solids and chemical oxygen demand, making treated oily wastewaters to easily meet discharge or reuse requirements, and produce <2% oily waste for off-site disposal, greatly reducing waste disposal cost. In the case of olive mill wastewater (OMW) treatment the O-WaR technology can effectively recover valuable by-products in OMW and create high values (up to €700/kg of recovered small phenolics for functional food, nutraceuticals and cosmeceuticals) for the industry. With the O-WaR technology we expect an annual profit of €1.4 million generated in an OMW treatment plant (20,000 m3/year capacity) and a total annual OPEX savings of €0.17 million for a metal processing factory with 20,000 m3/year wastewater produced compared to using a conventional technology. Also, the SMEs in this project are predicted to have a market opportunity of €11.7 million in first 5 years post project.
Fields of science
Topic(s)
Call for proposal
FP7-SME-2013
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
BSG-SME - Research for SMEsCoordinator
2750 Ballerup
Denmark