Industrielles Testfeld für sauberes Wasser
Press release - Fraunhofer IKTS - October 04, 2022
If we look at all of the business sectors in Germany, industry requires the largest amount of water. This makes access to efficient technology for cleaning and recycling water all the more important for this sector in particular. Ideally, this technology should also allow energy and valuable raw materials to be retrieved so that they can be reused in production. In order to address all of these issues in a practical way, researchers at Fraunhofer have been developing a testing and technology platform. It is located on-site at a large wastewater treatment plant, where the wastewater from one of the largest chemical parks in Europe is treated.
Thanks to its rigorous regulations on discharging wastewater into rivers as well as its efficient wastewater treatment plants with multi-stage filters and biological purification systems, Germany can be proud of its high water quality and first-class drinking water. However, quality requirements are on the rise and water management is facing new challenges. On one hand, this is due to water shortages: While supply has been decreasing due to climate change, demand – for example in agriculture and as a result of the widespread switch to the hydrogen economy – has been growing.
A research platform on-site at the factory
Fraunhofer has now started a project that will take the treatment of industrial wastewater to the next level and should enable bodies of water and drinking water to be even more efficiently protected. Another objective of this project is to collect recyclable materials from the wastewater. “Some of the residuals or process chemicals in industrial wastewater can be reused in industry as raw materials. This holds true for various salts and metals, for example. We are developing processes to retrieve these raw materials from wastewater,” explains Faßauer. As well as Fraunhofer IKTS, project partners include Fraunhofer ISE, IMWS and IME.
The special thing about this project is that Fraunhofer researchers did not install their technology platform in the laboratory. Instead, they deployed a range of test containers on-site at the joint water treatment plant in Bitterfeld-Wolfen. This is one of the most modern wastewater treatment plants in all of central Germany. As well as communal wastewater, the plant primarily treats industrial wastewater from just under 300 businesses in the Bitterfeld-Wolfen Chemical Park, one of the largest in Europe. “Our on-site presence means that we have targeted, consistent access to the relevant amount of certain wastewater. As such, we are able to conduct our experiments on an almost industrial scale and under real-world conditions,” says André Wufka, group manager for Systems Engineering for Water and Wastewater. A major advantage of the technology platform comes from its modular design. Aggregates and systems can be replaced at any time or moved to another location in the process. As such, the teams of experts can reproduce, analyze, reposition and optimize the technical processes at the wastewater treatment plant however they desire.