Belt Filter

As part of the expansion of the Patrick Terminals, Port of Brisbane operations, a new water efficient wash bay was required. It was important the solution complied with the Department of Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry’s standards and maximised the reuse of the wash water, eliminating any discharge of polluted water to local water ways.

A pet food manufacturing facility in Western Sydney, NSW, needed to separate residual product from washdown water in a variable slurry mixture created from a daily cleaning-in-place (CIP) process. The slurry was not able to be treated in the site’s wastewater treatment plant and therefore required filtration at the outlet source. MAK Water was asked to provide a belt filtration trial unit to provide proof of concept to build to build a business case for capital investment.

A manufacturer of solid & liquid plant nutrition and soil amendment products in Victoria was looking to improve efficiency. Sludge residues accumulate in the tanks used for product blending through the manufacturing process. This sludge comprises the concentrated raw/precursor solid product and some inert debris. During the cleaning & rinsing of these process tanks, the company has been wasting these sludge residues. However, given this sludge contains the concentrated precursor product, ideally this should be recovered and processed into a valuable liquid fertiliser product. MAK Water was selected to provide a Belt Filter (BF) trial plant for the company to operate and test onsite over a 2-week period. The purpose of the trial was to determine the filtering performance, determine the hydraulic capacity required for the site, and ultimately prove the business case for a full-scale BF. They successfully trialled sludge from various process tanks at various flow rates, and operating the BF at different speeds while adjusting the washing system for different on/off durations.