Energy saving at Wastewater
Politics, industry, and society must hustle mightily to achieve climate goals: The expansion of photovoltaic and wind power systems is an especially high priority. However, in the process, people frequently forget that reducing the energy consumption of existing systems can also have great effects.
Here, it is worthwhile to focus on areas that are frequently not the first thing people think of. In municipal infrastructures, for example, the largest consumer of energy is usually wastewater management. As they are designed today, wastewater treatment plans require a lot of energy to purify wastewater and eliminate pollutants. Added to this is the transport through the sewer system.
Wastewater management pumps can help save energy
Pumps play the decisive role in these processes: They require high volume flows for wastewater treatment plants, and they are also required to transport wastewater to the individual cleaning stages. Because their operating principle makes them a natural fit, centrifugal pumps are generally used for this, or more precisely: radial pumps, due to their suitable operating principle. These robust units pump powerfully and reliably with impellers that are adapted specifically for this application field. Pumps that are based on the principle of the radial pump can be used to pump wastewater, even heavily contaminated wastewater, without almost any blockages, especially if they are so-called torque flow pumps with open impellers. However, some positive displacement pumps, such as progressing cavity pumps or rotary lobe pumps, are also often found here, which can handle larger solids in particular.
However, reducing energy consumption in wastewater treatment plants and sewer systems also requires taking a look at the drives used for the pumps. For precisely due to their low maintenance and robust construction, motors are still used for municipal wastewater management that no longer fulfill today’s standards.
And it’s not just the impeller geometry that continues to develop; the drives’ energy efficiency is also making enormous progress. Modern centrifugal pumps are equipped with motors that fulfill the requirements of energy efficiency classes up to IE4 or even IE5. Added to this are the benefits of equipping them with frequency converters: This way, the pump’s output can be adjusted to the actual demand, which means that it consumes only as much energy as it actually needs to.
The right pump for every area of water treatment
Are you using pumps whose performance and efficiency can be optimized in a sewer system, wastewater treatment system or in a field adjacent to wastewater treatment? Our member companies have the necessary industry knowledge to provide the right pump for all delivery tasks – from raw sewage and mixed water to rake-cleaned or mechanically purified wastewater, on through to activated sludge, raw sewage, and digested sludge, as well as rainwater and purified sewage water.
The simplest way to the right pump, one that fulfills all of your requirements for performance and energy efficiency, is via the free PUMPselector: With this online tool, you can specify a few variables and get quick, direct suitabel wastewater pumps that meet your needs. Feel free to try it out now!
