Friesland Campina Upgrades Wastewater Treatment Plant With A Membrane Bioreactor System

The Friesland Campina Company is a major international dairy and ingredients company with more than 20,000 employees and products distributed worldwide. Friesland's plant in Delhi NY produces food products, and protein hydrolysates. These ingredients are used in the production of infant formula, whey protein beverages, and prebiotics for the food and beverage market. Prior to the treatment plant upgrade, wastewater from the plant was treated using an activated sludge system consisting of two aeration tanks and a pair of clarifiers, as well as a dissolved air floatation (DAF) unit to further polish the effluent to meet the final effluent limits. The system also included a small membrane bioreactor (MBR) that treated a portion of the wastewater and provided water to the DAF system. The existing wastewater treatment system had some aging equipment that needed replacement, was struggling to meet the final effluent limits for discharge to the Village of Delhi, and required excessive operator attention for monitoring effluent quality, pH control, and sludge thickening. Friesland partnered with Evoqua to upgrade the treatment system to address a number of issues at the wastewater plant, simplify operations, and improve effluent quality.
The existing system had very little wastewater storage capacity, and due to unexpected downtime of the forcemain to the village, additional storage was an important requirement for the upgraded system. As part of the system upgrade, a buffer tank was installed to give the system a storage capacity of 275,000 gallons to be used to equalize wastewater flow to the biological treatment system and provide wastewater storage if the forcemain to the village was taken offline for repairs.
The Friesland wastewater characteristics vary greatly depending on the products that are being produced at the plant, and the system had to be upgraded to meet the final effluent limits throughout all the influent wastewater conditions.
As part of the upgrade for the biological treatment system, the small existing equalization (EQ) tank was converted into a calamity tank to allow high-strength wastewater to be automatically diverted to the calamity tank and metered back into the system. The existing aeration tanks were reused; however, the aeration system was upgraded by installing new, larger aeration blowers and a new fine-bubble diffused aeration system to supply more air to the aeration tanks. New membrane tanks housing Memcor hollow fiber membrane modules were installed to replace the existing secondary clarifiers as the means for solids/liquid separation. This upgrade eliminated the need for the secondary clarifiers and improved final effluent quality, as the resulting high quality effluent meets discharge objectives for BOD (< 25 mg/l), TSS (< 30 mg/l), NH3-N (< 15 mg/l), TP (< 20 mg/l). The plant historically struggled to neutralize the wastewater to ensure final effluent met the pH limits. One of the challenges with the wastewater from the plant is that the pH can be high (over 11) for extended periods of time, such that the system pH needs to be controlled. As part of the upgrade, a sulfuric acid system was installed, and the pH neutralization process was automated, which both simplified the pH-neutralization process and optimized sulfuric acid usage by the plant. Since the new membrane tanks were sized to treat peak design wastewater flows, the existing MBR housing Kubota membranes was allowed to be repurposed as a sludge thickening system to concentrate the waste sludge prior to land application. Due to the upgrades to influent equalization and the biological treatment system, the clarifiers and the DAF were both taken offline after the upgrade was complete.
The following topics will be covered in depth as part of the paper on Friesland Campina's wastewater treatment plant upgrade:
- Review of MBR technologies
- Challenges associated with construction of the upgraded wastewater treatment plant
- Detailed descriptions of system operations
- Operating results during the first year following system commissioning
This case study will describe how Friesland Campina's upgraded wastewater treatment plant has significantly improved final effluent quality and simplified operations.