PITTSBURGH, PA, May 1, 2009 -- N.A. Water Systems, a Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies (VWS) company, announced the award of a patent for its AMDRO™ technology, a reverse osmosis (RO) process for treatment of acidic wastewater.
This process is particularly applicable to the mining and fertilizer production industries. In mining, AMDRO can be used to clean up acid mine drainage for discharge. For the fertilizer industry, it can be applied not only to clean up phosphate pond water for discharge, but also to recover phosphoric acid for use in the production process.
The process significantly reduces the cost for water treatment chemicals and sludge disposal as compared to the conventional approach. The technology has low capital cost, and incorporates effective scaling control to minimize the cleaning frequency for the RO membranes.
The patented process includes VWS' proprietary ACTIFLO® clarification technology and media filtration for pretreatment, followed by a double-pass RO and ion exchange polishing to produce a treated water stream suitable for discharge and reuse. The key to the technology is the operation of the pretreatment and the first-pass reverse osmosis process under acidic conditions to inhibit the precipitation of scale-forming compounds.
The technology will be introduced in the VWS booth at the Canadian Institute of Mining Conference and Exposition in Toronto, Canada, May 10-13, 2009.
N.A. Water Systems is a Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies company and provider of solutions for air, water and wastewater issues ranging from regulatory compliance assistance to complete turnkey installation of treatment systems.
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