Hybrid Thickener

“Better, faster and cheaper” with improved reliability sums up the development results to date for this hybrid thickener. With such a dramatic improvement versus conventional technology, we believe the difference is so great that a new class of centrifugal separator has emerged which will change market dynamics and open the door for new process technology development.

Over the last year, this concept design has been evaluated at 3 plants around the country. In the first two plants, the unit demonstrated far higher capacities than our standard thickening design while in the third plant we were able to consistently demonstrate a level of controllable performance over a 3 month period that the installed, “earlier” state of the art centrifuge technology was never able to achieve over the previous 15 years of operation. The design features include a significantly higher throughput capacity for the same floor space while substantially reducing the power consumption (HP/GPM) via proprietary technology (several patents that have been filed). Concurrently, these design features also work synergistically to greatly reduce wear which has been a problem with standard centrifuge designs in the past.

Because of the market size, the current efforts will be focused on thickening Waste Activated Sludge where the controllable range of cake solids for “no polymer” processing will be more flexible (3 – 8 % w/w ts cake solids) versus current standard offerings for all thickeners. This is made possible using pneumatic assist in a manner easily amenable to simplified process control. Further, the Centrisys thickener has advanced older centrifuge polymer reduction technologies to allow operation at up to 90 % less polymer than other thickening technologies such as Gravity Belt Thickeners and Rotary Drum Thickeners. This is possible due to the fact that 1) polymer is applied only to fine solids that will not separate without polymer (versus conditioning the entire sludge), 2) the centrifuge does not need to produce a large floc and 3) the polymer is gently applied to negate any adverse effects of shear.

This technology is also amenable to 1) any difficult to convey material and in particular cake solids with a liquid-like consistency and 2) materials which have limits on the amount of conditioning agents which can be applied. Finally, this technology is an enabling technology for a number of future applications.