Greentech Lead U.S: PARC, a Xerox company, has been
awarded $1 million grant from California Energy Commission to demonstrate a new
technology for wastewater treatment in California.
Hydrodynamic Separation (HDS), PARC’s breakthrough clean
water platform technology, separates particles from water without using
physical filters. HDS is particularly suited to recovering valuable material
from liquids, and is a modular, scalable technology that can address both large
treatment facilities and portable applications.
PARC’s HDS finds several applications including
wastewater treatment, algae dewatering, process water, cooling tower, bilge
water, mining water, separation of oil or other emulsions from water,
distributed/on-site water treatment and recovery of precious resources from
water. In addition to government work, PARC is working with many commercial
clients.
“The ultimate goal of this project is to help plants
become energy neutral, which is attractive to the state of California and
states across the US,” said Stephen Hoover, CEO, PARC. “To be
able to process millions of gallons of wastewater and provide two types of
output — electricity and clean water — which can be repeated across many
counties, states and countries is quite a remarkable project.”
Using HDS, PARC scientists will treat wastewater by
separating “suspended solids” (i.e. matter with high organic content)
from water into two distinct — and critical — resources, in a process called
primary treatment. The recovered solids will be processed through an anaerobic
digester to produce methane to generate electricity. The remaining, cleaner
water, devoid of much of the organic solids, will be further processed in a
secondary biological process.
Because of the greatly reduced organic content, the
demand for oxygen and thus aeration energy in the secondary process is
significantly reduced, resulting in further energy savings for the facility.
Because wastewater treatment facilities are enormous consumers of energy, the
goal of this project is to help enable plants to become energy neutral.
“The California Energy Commission applauds PARC’s
innovative wastewater treatment technology,” said Robert B. Weisenmiller,
California Energy Commission chair. “This project will help the State of
California reach its Renewable Portfolio Standard, while preserving
California’s precious water resource.”
The California Energy Commission approved the grant in
May 2012. PARC plans to work with the municipal wastewater treatment facility
in Sunnyvale, CA to demonstrate the HDS pilot system.