Source: KLa Systems
Nitrogen removal standards are a pressing concern for meat and poultry processing plants. Historically, food processing plants discharging to public waterways or directly to publicly owned wastewater treatment plants have faced challenges in meeting effluent limitation guidelines (ELGs) for nutrient removal. That may soon become even tougher yet with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announcing in September 2021 that it has completed a detailed study of the meat and poultry products category and will initiate new rulemaking to revise the existing discharge standards for the industry.
Fortunately, meat and poultry processing plants facing wastewater treatment upgrades have technologies available that can help optimize biological nitrogen removal (BNR) at their facilities. One such option is the KLa Systems Slot Injector™ aeration system, which resembles a modern jet aerator but incorporates a unique slot-shaped configuration to achieve higher efficiencies. The technology maximizes gas-liquid contacting through the discharge of a high-energy bubble cloud that facilitates continual surface renewal at the gas-liquid interface and higher alpha factors compared to conventional diffusers.
The Slot Injector is aptly suited for both conventional and advanced air activated sludge plants and offers key advantages for operations like meat and poultry that have significant nitrogen removal requirements.
At a large poultry processing plant, Slot Injector™ aerators were installed in two circular tanks that comprise the nitrogen removal stage of a wastewater treatment upgrade.
Multistage Flexibility
In meat and poultry processing, amino acids from animal byproducts break down into ammonia, producing a large nitrogen load in thewastewater stream. For addressing this pollutant load, multistage oxic-anoxic treatment processes offer the potential for efficientnitrogen removal and employ microorganisms for converting ammonia to nitrogen gas for release to the atmosphere.
With the ability to shut off the aeration feed and regulate dissolved oxygen (DO) levels in the tank, the Slot Injector™ aeration system canbe used for both the oxic and anoxic phases, providing efficiently controlled aeration for the nitrification mode and well-distributed liquidmixing without aeration during the denitrification mode. This feature provides operators with lots of flexibility in terms of how they canrun their plants.
