374Water’s AirSCWO™ Process: Eliminating PFAS and Forever Chemicals in Orange County’s Wastewater through Supercritical Water Oxidation
374Water’s AirSCWO™(Supercritical Water Oxidation) Process Wastewater and eliminates PFAS and other ‘forever chemicals’.
What can you get out of Orange County’s wastewater? Apparently, a lot.
But what exactly goes into 374Water’s AirSCWO process? Well, sludge –– Sludge that is made up of six percent biosolids and 94 percent water, to be precise. But more importantly, what comes out after undergoing super critical water oxidation is even more valuable: clean water, a mineral Brine, and energy. Here’s how it all gets broken down.
AirSCWO Treatment Step One: Pre-treatment of Biosolids
The first step in the process is the pre-treatment of the biosolids found in the sludge’s contents. After the sludge is filtered and thickened up to 18% solids, it’s ready for direct injection and treatment in our patented AirSCWO system.
The latest release of regulations from the US Environmental Protection Agency outlines ways in which wastewater plants will need to soon begin considering alternative disposal of sludges, such as PFAS-laden sludge. Unlike the current conventional processes, the AirSCWO process can help eliminate many common forms of PFAS found in local water systems.
AirSCWO Treatment Step Two: SCWO Treatment
Once the solids are filtered and thickened, they are processed by the AirSCWO system and then sent through AirSCWO’s dewatering system. The process brings the same biosolids up to 3,400 PSI – that’s about 220 times atmospheric pressure – and adds a significant level of high temperature over 374 degrees Celsius (705 degrees Fahrenheit) to the reactor. All this together creates a very fast oxidation process which eliminates harmful chemicals used in consumer products, separate solids, and produce treatable water. In the end, we are left with about three percent of the overall solids that were fed into the system, in addition to clean water and energy.
AirSCWO Treatment Step Three: The Final Product
At the beginning of the treatment process, we started with sludge made up of six percent biosolids The tangible final products are three-fold; the first is a clean water effluent, the second is the mineral and last, energy.