Combating micro-pollutants with ozone

More and more micro-pol­lu­tants are enter­ing water bod­ies through indus­tri­al oper­a­tions or appli­ca­tions in agri­cul­ture. In addi­tion, the use of med­i­cines and cos­met­ics in pri­vate house­holds leads to residues in the water. These sub­stances are dif­fi­cult to biode­grade and can hard­ly be removed by con­ven­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy in waste­water treat­ment plants.

In order to remove pol­lu­tants as com­plete­ly as pos­si­ble from waste­water, ozone is being used more and more fre­quent­ly. Ozone is the strongest oxi­dant in water treat­ment. It reli­ably removes con­t­a­m­i­nants and is not only high­ly effec­tive, but also envi­ron­men­tal­ly friend­ly and resource-saving.

Ozone breaks down trace sub­stances by means of oxi­da­tion or con­verts them into small­er mol­e­cules. These can be bro­ken down more eas­i­ly by microor­gan­isms in an after-treat­ment stage or removed by absorp­tion.  These com­bined process­es improve the over­all treat­ment per­for­mance and usu­al­ly remove more than 80 per­cent of trace sub­stances from waste­water. At the same time, oper­at­ing costs are low­er than for com­pa­ra­ble technologies.

Pos­i­tive side effects of ozona­tion include a reduc­tion in the micro­bial load in waste­water, decol­oriza­tion and fur­ther COD reduc­tion. COD is a mea­sure of chem­i­cal oxy­gen demand and indi­cates the organ­ic load of the water. The low­er the COD load, the clean­er the water. For the tech­ni­cal imple­men­ta­tion, the con­tact time and the spe­cif­ic dosage are deci­sive. Ozone is pro­duced on site in an ozone generator.

Ozone generation with low operating costs

Keep­ing ozone gen­er­a­tion as eco­nom­i­cal as pos­si­ble is not easy, because the amount of ozone also varies enor­mous­ly due to the high­ly fluc­tu­at­ing waste­water vol­umes and com­po­si­tion of trace sub­stances. The new DZLCOZON OZLa ozone plant from ProMi­nent offers a high degree of reli­a­bil­i­ty and can be equipped with up to 16 ozone gen­er­a­tor mod­ules. The mod­ules can be switched on and off as required. This allows the amount of ozone pro­duced to be adjust­ed to fluc­tu­a­tions, such as in a waste­water treat­ment plant where a lot or lit­tle waste­water is treat­ed at times.