Mitsubishi Electric Power Products Inc., a full-service manufacturer of ozone systems for drinking water applications, now also provides systems for wastewater applications, including disinfection, color removal, odor control, and oxidation of compounds of emerging concern (CECs).
The move is in response to the increasing need for municipalities and industries to treat wastewater sufficiently as regulations grow more stringent, and also for re-use in irrigation and other applications, as water sources continue to decline due to drought, population growth and other causes.
Mitsubishi Electric draws on special engineering resources for water applications that cover all generating and ancillary equipment and its automation, and the influence of related processes. To help assure reliable delivery of ozone, its generators feature patented technology designed to maximize continuity of operation.
“It’s not a big stretch at all for this company to expand into wastewater,” Kim Robert P. Kim, M.S., Env.Sci., sales manager for Mitsubishi Electric’s Ozone Systems Division said. “The systems required for some flow rates may be large in order to provide ozone in the concentrations required, and Mitsubishi Electric Power Products is the only U.S.-based manufacturer of large systems. What’s especially important for WWTP operators is that they can now work with a major electronics products company with huge resources in industrial electro-technologies. We are not just a water treatment company.”
“Ozone systems are primarily electronic, and what makes ozone work or not work for regulated water applications is reliability for continuous delivery, and optimized operating efficiency,” he noted. “To get that reliability and cost control, WWTP operators need particularly good performance from ozone manufacturing cells, power supplies and input air drying equipment, which have been weak links for other manufacturers. Mitsubishi Electric has continuously improved reliability and efficiency for those components, including patented technology, and is now in position to effectively deliver our expertise here.”
One wastewater application for ozone derives from the U.S. EPA’s regulation of discharge of chlorine to surface water, which is often addressed through pre-discharge dechlorination processes that utilize a sulfide product.
Kim adds that a reliable ozone system can eliminate both the need for chlorine and the need to neutralize it, as well as the need to control regulated chlorine by-products, pathogenic microorganisms and compounds of emerging concern (CECs).
“Ozone doesn’t leave a residual because it’s a very unstable molecule that reverts back to oxygen after it’s done its job,” he explained. “It can also oxidize toxic organic compounds that filters can’t remove, such as endocrine disrupting compounds (EDCs), which are becoming of increasing concern to EPA.”
