Immersion Heaters in Waste Water Treatment

The increased awareness of environmental protection has brought wastewater treatment to the forefront as a critical issue, with local councils enforcing strict standards for the quality of wastewater dumped into waterways. Therefore, relevant stakeholders should treat wastewater before dumping it into the sewage system to ensure compliance with health and safety laws. This has necessitated wastewater treatment procedures to improve in efficiency, performance, and footprint, with immersion heaters playing a significant role at the center of it all. That said, this article will examine immersion heaters in wastewater treatment, the process of wastewater treatment, and adapting to wastewater treatment.

The process of wastewater treatment

The treatment of wastewater is divided into eight stages:

Pumping and Screening

Screening machinery removes rags, wood fragments, plastics, and lubricants from incoming wastewater. Before being thrown in a landfill, the recovered material is cleaned and pressed. After that, the grit-removal stage is carried out on the filtered wastewater.

Getting Rid of Grit

This phase removes heavy material from the effluent, such as sand and gravel before a landfill is used to dispose of this garbage. It’s worth noting that the dissolved constituents of the influent stream are not removed in the first two stages.

Primary Settling

The material is removed in large circular tanks known as clarifiers, settling more slowly than in step two. Primary sludge is then driven out of the bottom of the tank, while wastewater is drained from the top. Floating debris, such as grease, is scraped off the surface and transported to digesters with the settled waste.

Phosphorus is also removed using chemicals at this time.

Aeration

In this process, the effluent is treated to the greatest extent possible. Microorganisms are used to absorb the pollutants and then biologically break them down into tissue, water, and nitrogen. This phase’s bioactivity is identical to that seen at the bottom of water bodies; however, degradation takes years in these locations.

Secondary Settling

Secondary clarifiers are large circular tanks that isolate the treated water from the biological materials in the aeration tanks. The separation culminates in a discharge that has become over 90% treated. The activated sludge from the bottom of the clarifiers is continuously drawn and transported to the aeration tanks in step four, but not at this stage.

Filtration

By filtering the cleansed effluent over a 10-micron polyester medium, this method polishes it. Material collected on the disc filters’ surfaces is carefully washed and delivered to the plant’s head for treatment regularly.

Disinfection

After the filtration process, UV disinfection is employed to ensure that the treated wastewater is entirely bacteria-free.

Uptake of Oxygen

The treated water is aerated to raise the dissolved oxygen level above the prescribed maximum. The wastewater is then dumped into the stream or distilled if the stream requires additional processing to be converted to potable drinking water.

Where do immersion heaters come into play?

Immersion heaters in wastewater treatment keep disasters at bay. However, it can be risky to release combustible or explosive gases that have been accumulated in wastewater and released during the treatment process. These fumes harm the heater, the heating element, and the entire system. Fortunately, electric immersion heaters can deal with toxic chemical vapors and compounds such as acids, fluorides, and chlorides.

Water can be heated, transformed into a vapor, and condensed during wastewater control. The hardest gases in liquid and chemical forms are left behind after water evaporates. Heaters feature a quartz or titanium makeup with an additional polytetrafluoroethylene coating to ensure heating elements perform without corrosion. Because it includes so much phosphoric and sulfuric acids, wastewater from metal finishing tanks is the most harmful.

The conversion of effluent water from wastewater treatment to potable water relies heavily on distillation. Distillation, often known as evaporation, is a unique separation technique that separates water from impurities by changing the water’s physical state from liquid to vapor. Traditionally, atmospheric evaporation was employed to modify the physical stage of the influent water by heating it with either a combustion process or steam.

Winterization of industrial plants and immersion heaters

Winterization of industrial processes is one of the most critical applications of immersion heaters. Its also not restricted to wastewater treatment. When it comes to winterization, heat tracing is the first thing that springs to mind. Process heating and heat tracing, on the other hand, are two very different processes.

An immersion heater maintains the temperature and provides heat to reduce any condensation in the pipes, while heat trace keeps the process heat in the system. Immersion heaters in wastewater treatment significantly improve conventional heating methods such as steam or combustion-based systems. These systems have severe performance constraints at subzero temperatures.

Electric immersion heaters provide better performance than steam-based systems because they maintain a precise temperature.