ROVAPO - zero liquid discharge

ROVAPO ™ is a family of “zero-discharge” systems, allowing full recovery of water from industrial sewage and leachate.

Depending on industry it is used for production of:
a) highly purified water with conductivity <10ms (demineralized water), for example from galvanic industry;
b) deionized water in the pharmaceutical quality (<1ms)
c) water for reuse in multiple production processes (partially desalinated) or for heating (steam production water)
d) water in biogas plants closed loop

Technology includes a series of purification steps: a) the selection of streams and chemical treatment, b) membrane systems, c) evaporation systems.

Suitable selection of waste water streams of the production side, allows their pre-treatment in chemical processes (in some cases additional or substitutive membrane separation step - eg, ultrafiltration – is necessary).

For example, for various types of electroplating process of the primary lanes of sewerage are subject to separate before pre-treatment processes (processes of oxidation, reduction, precipitation of metals). Then sewages are going for further coagulation, flocculation and sedimentation, and the prefiltration before membranes. Prepared in this way - do not contain traces - of heavy metals or cyanide.

After first step pretreated effluent goes to desalination step, ie. reverse multistage osmosis or selective nanofiltration. Such installations are designed in a special way - due to our proprietary software, capacity of membrane the installation is constant irrespective of the concentration of salt in waste water.

Water after desalination in a membrane system, if necessary is additionally deionized which gives possibility to obtain water with conductivity lower than 1mS.

Retentate from membrane part is pumped for a low-temperature vacuum evaporator with energy recovery. After this step waste is turned down to  a salt concentrated in the evaporator system (and depending on application crystallizer).

Advantages:
• Recovery of waste water above 98% (depending on the application)
• Use of PPEKO proprietary software allows to work of installation fully, regardless of the variable quantity and composition of wastewater from the production;
• Minimizing the amount of solid wastes. The only waste is a sludge from chemical treatment and salt concentrate (from evaporator) containing approximately 50% dry matter.

ROVAPO™ technology can be enhanced with other components after primary treatment – ie. biologically activated sludge step utilizing UF membranes (MBR - AeroMem™). Therefore ROVAPO enables also the recovery of water from sewage which is applicable to biological treatment.