Compact Treatment Systems to Serve Grain Mills

By Andrew Walker

The industrial production of baked goods and pasta requires great amounts of high-grade treated water so that the processes run perfectly and the quality of the end-product is right. In Turkmenistan, Unionmatex Industrieanlagen, a German turnkey supplier of industrial plants, is building several large-scale grain mill plants with a connected bakery.

The company is relying on Berkefeld water treatment technology to manage the water cycle ranging from the production of drinking and process water and purification to the recycling of the wastewater.

"For this project of our customers in Turkmenistan we need a compact water treatment system with robust and proven process technology that can be installed on-site without complications and reliably supply water in the quality demanded," said Jürgen P. R. Grobe, Managing Director of Unionmatex.

Berkefeld, a subsidiary of Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies, is supplying a river-water treatment plant for the grain mills in Serdar and in Ruhabat. The treatment plants will provide drinking water for the mills, process water for a large-scale bakery and the boiler water backfeed. The raw water used stems from the Karakum Canal which, originating in the Himalayas, crosses the Karakum Desert and on whose banks intensive agricultural activity takes place. The water technology was designed and built at the Berkefeld production site in Celle, Germany, fully assembled on basic frameworks and thoroughly tested in advance.

In its first treatment stage, the plant encompasses gravel filtration, UFlex™ ultrafiltration, activated carbon filters, a pure water tank and booster pumps. This process rids the river water of suspended matter, organic and fertilizer residues and produces the required drinking water quality.

In Ruhabat, where the grain mill complex is connected to a large-scale bakery, what is demanded for a production line for baked goods and pasta is, among other things, extremely low-salt water in even higher quality with a conductivity of less than 150 µS/cm, and for another production line of even less than 50 µS/cm. To achieve this objective, in the second treatment stage the process steps of softening and reverse osmosis by a Berkefeld maxiRO™ system will be employed.

The water part of the overall project of Unionmatex encompasses the water cycle right up to wastewater. For the latter, Berkefeld is supplying its WWT 9 Biopur type plug-and-play wastewater treatment plant. This robust biological plant copes with wastewater quantities with organic loads corresponding to 50 or 150 inhabitant equivalents. A follow-up Berkal™ high-performance disc filter with fully automatic backwashing cleans the water of further suspended particles. The entire wastewater treatment enables an extremely effective reuse of wastewater, which is then used to water green spaces.

"In this demanding project for Unionmatex we have deployed many elements of our product offer," said Volker Alps, head of Industry Projects and Building Technology at Berkefeld. "Especially successful was the intelligent combination of our process technologies, ranging from drinking and process water to wastewater. Together with our partners at Unionmatex we have supplied a well-rounded concept for the water management of this industrial project."

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