News - full story
Magnetite's weight increases capacity but not footprint
26/01/2012
Siemens buys Cambridge Water Tech
Acquisition boosts municipal water treatment
Claudia Flavell-While
SIEMENS, through its industry automation division, has agreed to buy the water treatment specialist Cambridge Water Technology (CWT).
The acquisition is an important part in Siemens’ strategy to focus on cost-effective high-tech technologies for municipal water and wastewater treatment, the company says. CWT has developed technologies to increase the rate of solids removal and improve the capacity and performance of contaminant removal processes.
“Compared to conventional technologies, Cambridge Water Technology's proven market solutions require less than half of the footprint and increase the capacity of existing treatment systems by 23 times without adding any new tankage,” Siemens says in a statement.
CTW uses magnetite as a high specific gravity weighting agent to infuse the biological or chemical floc. It says this improves clarification rates between 10 and 30-fold compared with conventional processes, doubles or triples flow capacity, allows the process to cope well with the high water flows seen during wet weather without loss of the sludge blanket, and improves the performance of the nutrient and solids removal process.
The company has two separate magnetite-based processes. CoMag is a coagulant-magnetite process tailored for primary and tertiary wastewater treatment, phosphorus/nutrient removal, recycle-reuse water production, process water production, and CSO management. The BioMag process is designed for biological water treatment and can be retrofitted to existing activated sludge plants, resulting in a significant increase of capacity and reduced suspended solids, BOD, nitrogen, and phosphorus concentrations without adding any new tankage.
Siemens plans to integrate CWT with its existing municipal wastewater business but maintain the company’s offices in Massachusetts, US, along with its senior management team.
