Water purification is not a myth anymore. It can become the reality we’ve always dreamed of and this with low costs.
The Cleantech company from Luxembourg has made a water processing system, called EPURAMAT. They have developed an ingenious way to purify water using the power of gravity. A ten meter high container called Box4Water is able to remove solids and biological material from wastewater.A single container can purify all the water needed for a large hotel or a small village of 200-1,000 people and this using almost no energy at all. The only energy it needs is to push up the water to the top of the container. Larger container may purify enough water for a small city with 1,000 – 50,000 inhabitants.
The system is made from the following:
1. Pre-treatment contains a rake to prevent large solid materials entering the treatment facility
2. The ExSep solid/liquid separator
3. Subsequent cleaning process: dissolved solid materials are processed by compact bioreactors or membrane filtration.
4. Sludge drainage processes solids separated by the ExSep.
EPURAMAT uses simple physics to clean water. Inside the ExSep a vortex is created and water begins to swirl toward the bottom, similar to water going down a drain. Waters speed increases and solids and other materials form a beam inside. They can then be sucked out with vacuum, leaving water clean enough to be reused.
The process is made entirely in the interior of the container, so there is no odor and noise are considerably reduced. Costs can be drastically reduced compared to biological wastewater treatment plants and the estimation is by half. The cost of cleaning 1 cubic meter of wastewater goes to around 20 cents.
EPURAMAT installed already several systems in Europe, either sold or leased and has plans with a large Canadian petroleum producer to install a container that will remove oil from wastewater. As well there is a plan to install a system for a cement company in the next few months.
EPURAMAT is very confident that their system will be catchy and mostly because of lower investment costs, maintenance costs and as well low energy requirements.
