Chemical Water Purification Systems
Skol Brewery Ltd Rwanda Uses Energy Produced From Wastewater To Heat Boilers class="doc-header">Skol Brewery Ltd Rwanda Uses Energy Produced From Wastewater To Heat Boilers
A beer making company in Rwanda is now producing energy from wastewater organic pollutants to power its boiler equipment.
The Skol Brewery has partnered with the Global Water Engineering (GWE) to turn wastewater organic pollutants into biogas for internal use while achieving high environmental benefits.
Rwanda has a strong need for sustainable technologies, with the World Health Organization?s African Regional Office identifying, ?Rwanda undoubtedly faces significant environmental challenges, and needs to invest significantly in adapting to current climate challenges as well as in adaptation to future climate change.??
Water shortages are also a significant problem in Rwanda, with water needs in Kigali city being only met at 50% or less especially in a dry season in a city with urbanization growth rate of more than 9% annually.
Skol Brewery Rwanda?s new installation, incorporating some of the world?s most efficient and proven GWE waste-to-energy technologies, aligns Skol Brewery with top international environmental wastewater standards and demonstrates the company is taking important action to ensure the sustainability of its operations, says GWE Chairman and CEO Jean Pierre Ombregt.
The new process at the Kigali plant involves GWE?s globally distributed anaerobic waste digestion technology proven in more than 150 waste-to-green energy plants worldwide, including dozens of breweries.
The technology not only improves sustainability outcomes but also decreases operating costs.
The anaerobic digestion technology is also integral to 415 high-quality industrial wastewater and waste treatment plants in 62 countries, the benefits of which apply to any food and beverage, agribusiness or manufacturing operation with one or more organically loaded wastewater and waste streams.
Skol Kigali?s new continuous system ? which replaces an old sequential batch reactor ? highly efficiently removes organic waste material from production wastewater, converting more than 90 percent of the wastewater?s Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD).
The new wastewater treatment plant is a reliable method of turning organic waste into usable biogas.
This organic material is transformed into biogas (mainly methane) to replace the need for an equivalent amount of fossil fuel to power the plant boilers equipment, while the treated wastewater effluent leaving the plant delivers high environmental benefits through achieving discharge limits of 250mg/L COD.
The new process ? now successfully in its first full year of operation ? begins with pre-treatment, followed by a modern treatment line utilizing GWE?s robust ANUBIX-B system at the heart of the process.
Sludge management and dewatering unit are also used to process any excess sludge.
?The methane-rich biogas produced by the ANUBIX process is reused to power an existing boiler unit, replacing baseline power requirements, which is a further benefit to the brewery,?? said Ombregt.
?Breweries, and other food and beverage companies, are often literally flushing money down the drain in the form of wastewater. They are spending money to treat or dispose of their wastewater when they could be treating it as a resource and turning wastewater into a profitable source of energy,?? he said.
Because it is a continuous system, indoor playground - https://www.familypark.org/ - green energy can continue to be generated consistently. This baseload green energy capacity represents a further significant advance on the plant?s previous Sequence Batch Reactor system.
The new GWE system handles wastewater inlet quantities of 920 m3 per day.
The upgraded plant has a capacity of 3220 kg/day of organic matter, or Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) load.
Inlet COD concentration is 3500 mg/L and the COD effluent discharge limit is 250 mg/L, with the GWE process removing more than 92% of COD and radically improving the effluent water quality, meaning that Skol Brewery has a minimal impact on local water systems.
?Using this sort of technology to not only treat wastewater and turn it into green energy but also to power existing boilers or otherwise utilize the additional biogas is becoming increasingly common as forward-thinking companies strive to meet sustainability initiatives and minimize their negative impacts on the environment. Larger anaerobic treatment installations can even generate additional profit in perpetuity because excess biogas or energy can be sold back to the grid,?? said Ombregt.
Developing countries like Rwanda are highly aware of the need for sustainability and are increasingly implementing technologies to safeguard the environment and precious natural resources like water.
While there is still a long way to go ? and this applies to everyone, globally ? early adopters of environmentally harmonious technologies like Skol Brewery will pave the way for further advances in energy-efficiency that will benefit communities and the country as a whole.
500Ls Plant Is The Largest In Latin America
Over the past decade, numerous physics studies have explored how oscillating electric fields produced by lasers or microwave sources can be used to dynamically alter the properties of materials on demand. In a new study featured in Nature Physics, two researchers at the University of Copenhagen and Nanyang Technological University (NTU), in Singapore, have built upon the findings of these studies, uncovering a mechanism through which a non-magnetic interacting metal can spontaneously magnetize.
"Recent experiments in nanoplasmonics have shown that when the electrons in nanoscale metallic systems are collectively excited, they can, in fact, produce extremely intense oscillating electric fields all on their own," Mark Rudner, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told Phys.org. "In light of this observation, we set out to uncover what new phenomena could arise when these 'internal fields' within a material feed back to change the properties of the material itself."
The internal fields that Rudner refers to are intense oscillating electric fields that originate from charge oscillations in a metal, known as plasmons. Plasmons are often used to confine light to length scales far below its original wavelength at a nanoscale, as well as to guide its propagation through devices. The detailed behavior of a plasmon (e.g. the frequency it oscillates at, its chirality, etc.) is directly dependent on a material's properties, such as its electronic bandstructure.
"Typically, these material specifics are thought to be fixed quantities of the material chosen; to get a different type of plasmon one would conventionally have to use a different material," Justin Song, the other researcher involved in the study, told Phys.org. "We wondered if there was a way to get around this constraint. Importantly, if a plasmon's strong internal fields could modify a material's electronic band structure thereby changing the material's properties, it would also transform the plasmon as well, setting up a feedback loop enabling the plasmon to take on new types of behavior."
Once they realized that oscillating internal fields in an excited material can change its electronic properties, Rudner and Song set out to demonstrate this concept within the simplest possible setup. They thus decided to study nanoscale graphene disks, as graphene is a widely available and high-quality material that has favorable characteristics for observing this effect. Using this setup, they demonstrated the conditions under which feedback from the internal fields of collective modes could trigger an instability towards spontaneous magnetization in the system.
"We theoretically analyzed how the plasmons in a graphene disk morphed under linearly polarized irradiation and found that when the light intensity was low, the plasmon should oscillate along the same direction as the light polarization," Song explained. "However, above a critical intensity, our theoretical analysis indicated that the plasmon can spontaneously choose to rotate, acquiring a handedness that was not originally present in the metallic disk nor the irradiating light. In this way, the plasmons acquire a 'separate life' (spontaneously choosing a chirality) distinct from both that of the material that hosts it (the metallic disk) as well as that of the light field that is driving it (the linearly polarized irradiation)."
In their study, Rudner and Song showed that the collective modes of driven systems can sometimes take on a 'life of their own," exhibiting unique and spontaneous symmetry-breaking phenomena that are independent of the underlying equilibrium phase. Although the researchers illustrated this principle using nanoscale graphene disks, it also applies to other materials.
"The key observation when carrying out our analysis was that, from the point of view of an electron within a material, an electric field is an electric field: it doesn't matter whether this oscillating field was produced by a laser shining on the material from outside (as previously studied), indoor playground (www.familypark.org) or collectively by all of the other electrons within the material itself," Rudner said. "This opens a world of new possibilities wherein internal fields produced by collective excitations in materials may lead to a variety of new phenomena."
As Rudner and Song explain, the properties of collective modes, such as plasmons, are generally 'locked' to their host material. Interestingly, however, their observations prove that plasmons can defy this 'locking' to their host material. In other words, their study shows that plasmons can have phases that are distinct from the underlying material hosting them.
The study carried out by Rudner and Song offers new valuable insight into how oscillating electric fields within materials, particularly non-magnetic metals, can alter some of their properties. So far, the researchers have concentrated on the distinct phases of plasmons, but they are now planning to examine other collective modes that might exhibit similar symmetry-breaking phenomena.
"We hope to see our predictions borne out in experiments in the near future," Rudner said. "On a theoretical level, there are many fundamental questions to explore about the nature of the non-equilibrium spontaneous symmetry breaking that we predicted, as well as extensions to other physical systems and types of behaviors. We also plan to investigate possible applications of this phenomenon, for example in optoelectronics."
Dow strengthen Prices For Versene Chelating Agents In Europe
AkzoNobel Functional Chemicals is relocating the headquarters applications of surfactants its Chelates business from the Netherlands to China. The move has been prompted by the growing importance of the Asian market.
"It is extremely important for us to be in close proximity to our customers in China and the Asia Pacific region," explained Functional Chemicals General Manager Bob Margevich. "This move will allow us to fully support AkzoNobel's commitment to expanding its global Specialty Chemicals activities. The worldwide scale of our activities also underlines our commitment to focusing on the needs of ourcustomers, wherever they may be."
Currently based in Amersfoort, the Chelates business will move its head office to Shanghai during the summer. Chelates General Manager Geert Hofman and Controller Prasanta Dutt will also relocate to China during the course of the year, with Hofman taking on the additional role of Functional Chemicals' administrative representative for Asia Pacific.
Hofman added that the move made perfect strategic sense: "Functional Chemicals will be the predominant user of a EUR250 million grassroots multi-site currently being built in China by AkzoNobel. Located in Ningbo, it will include facilities for the production of chelating agents and ethylene amines. As well as creating several hundred jobs - so enhancing career opportunities in the region - it will utilize state-of-the-art technology and upon completion will be one of the company's biggest sites in the world."
