GE says that in a recent pilot study at a major global beverage company in Asia, GE’s AquaSel™ non-thermal brine concentrator (NTBC) technology achieved near-zero liquid discharge (ZLD) and reduced water costs, without the energy expense associated with a thermal evaporation system. Using today’s technology, bottling companies can typically use 75-85% of the water supplied to their treatment room for bottled water and the variety of soft drinks they offer. The rest is discharged as a waste stream. Using GE’s AquaSel, these companies could safely treat and reuse the water to achieve more than 99% recovery in their plants.“Billions of gallons of usable water are lost every day because today’s water treatment technologies have techno-economic limits on how much water can be treated and reused,” said Heiner Markhoff, president and CEO - water and process technologies for GE Power & Water. “GE’s NTBC technology can turn billions of gallons of lost water into clean, usable water by virtually eliminating the wastewater streams in a variety of industrial and municipal treatment processes.”GE’s AquaSel allows nearly 100 percent of water reuse in bottling plants and can remove impurities at room temperature, representing a more cost-effective, less energy-intensive way to treat and reuse water. In the pilot study, the AquaSel system had a capacity of 36,000 gal/d (5.7 m3/h). In more than 1,000 hours of operation with this new process, the bottler was able to capture and convert 1.5 million gallons (5,678 m3) of what was previously considered a waste stream into water suitable for reuse with a quality equivalent to that of the incoming water to the plant. With GE’s AquaSel system, the overall water recovery within the ingredient water room was increased to greater than 99%, which means that less than 1% of the influent water is now a byproduct of the new process.
