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SediLogic Technologies

Industrial pre-treatment

Petrochemical effluent plant

Ammonia running at six to eight milligrams per litre after the plant's nitrifying population failed.

Under 1mg/L

ammonia, from six to eight

Field resultNo method stated
Duty
Industrial pre-treatment
Sector
Industrial
Treatment window
Not published
What was counted
Nitrogen and ammonia
  • Bench data recorded alongside the plant figures
Aboveground steel storage tanks at an industrial facility.
Illustration — aboveground tanks at an industrial site, not the plant described on this page.

01The plant

What was being treated

A petrochemical effluent works treating 6,000 tons a day, with six hours of retention through the system and no room in the process to add a stage.

02Before

How the material got there

New discharge rules put the works' ammonia limit below 5 mg/L. It was running six to eight. Several nitrifying products had already been tried, domestic and imported, and none of them held the figure down. The record does not diagnose why they failed there — only that they did, repeatedly, and across more than one supplier.

03Treatment

What was applied, and how

A different route entirely. What was applied uses heterotrophic organisms: they take their energy from organic carbon and take up ammonia nitrogen as they grow, rather than oxidising ammonia for energy the way autotrophic nitrifiers do, and that is what makes them less sensitive to a six-hour retention time. Bench work set the application rate first; the product then went into the operating works on a daily schedule, with no change to the existing process.

Every result in this library was measured at an operating plant treating with one of the formulations SediLogic supplies, over the window stated above. It is a field result published as reported, not a controlled trial we ran.

04Sizing

What the quantity was set against

Set from bench work on the works' own wastewater before anything went into the plant, then applied daily. That order is uncommon and worth noticing — most rates are set from a table and checked afterwards, if at all.

05Comparison

What was left untreated

The bench test carried a genuine untreated control, and a third arm running one of the nitrifying products that had failed at the works. All three started near 5 mg/L. Across twenty-four hours the treated arm fell to 0.029 mg/L; the untreated control rose to 6.62 and was still at 5.32 at 144 hours; the nitrifier arm rose to 6.14 and finished at 6.07, tracking the control rather than the treatment. That is a controlled comparison and it is the strongest evidence on this page — but it is bench work. The full-scale application had no control at all: it ran on a live works at 6,000 tons a day with nothing else held constant, and its before-treatment figure of six to eight mg/L is a baseline, not an untreated comparison. The two datasets are kept apart here for that reason and must not be read as one.

06Outcome

What followed

The works had been over the new limit continuously and is now under it. That is what happened at that facility, on that wastewater.

At the start

Works effluent ammonia at six to eight mg/L, against a new limit below five.

At the close

2 mg/L three days after the first application and below 1 mg/L after that; the works' own record puts it at 0.7 to 0.8.

07Limits

What this record does not establish.

The source gives no influent ammonia load, no temperature, no pH, no dissolved oxygen and no dates for the run, so none of those appear here and nothing about the conditions can be checked. It reports that COD came down, which is what carbon-consuming organisms would do, and gives no figure before or after — so there is no number to carry. The bench arms started near 5 mg/L and the works ran at six to eight; they are not the same measurement. No facility is named.

Only the volatile organic fraction of a sludge responds to any of this. Grit, sand, silt, mineral precipitates and plastics remain at any dose, here and everywhere else.

Nitrifying organisms do not survive drying. No product in SediLogic's dry range addresses an ammonia or total-nitrogen permit, and this record is published as part of the field record rather than as an offer.

—What we would supply

For this duty, in our range.

SediLogic Liquid is the article in the range that reaches this — a concentrate for systems a solid cannot be dosed into, which covers most of what sits upstream of an industrial outfall. Where the target is instead an accumulated blanket in a holding basin, the sinking solids are the right format and the lagoon products apply.

SediLogic holds a written dose table for wastewater lagoons and for no other duty. Industrial loads are also the least alike of anything on this site — a rate set for one plant's effluent means very little at the next — so a quantity here is settled with a person, against your own stream.

Talk to us about a pre-treatment stream

—Read next

The same duty, measured somewhere else.

  • Industrial pre-treatment

    Coking plant effluent treatment

    IndustrialWeeks

    29 to 86%

    ammonia removal

    Field resultConfounded

    A nitrifying population that would not establish itself, leaving ammonia removal at less than a third of what the permit assumed.

    • COD removal reported as improved over the same period

    Nitrifying organisms do not survive drying. No product in SediLogic's dry range addresses an ammonia or total-nitrogen permit, and this record is published as part of the field record rather than as an offer.

    Nitrogen and ammoniaBOD and COD

  • Industrial pre-treatment

    Refinery effluent plant

    IndustrialNot published

    $1,000,000

    reported as avoided by recovering nitrification

    Field resultNo method stated

    A nitrifying population lost from the plant, and an ammonia figure heading for a limit while it re-established.

    • No before-and-after ammonia concentrations are published

    Nitrifying organisms do not survive drying. No product in SediLogic's dry range addresses an ammonia or total-nitrogen permit, and this record is published as part of the field record rather than as an offer.

    Nitrogen and ammonia

  • Industrial pre-treatment

    Landfill leachate treatment, Chengdu, China

    Industrial26 hours

    850 to 4mg/L

    ammonia, in twenty-six hours

    Field result

    Leachate arriving at the treatment plant with an ammonia concentration in the high hundreds of milligrams per litre.

    • 93 per cent of the reduction inside the first ten hours

    Nitrifying organisms do not survive drying. No product in SediLogic's dry range addresses an ammonia or total-nitrogen permit, and this record is published as part of the field record rather than as an offer.

    Nitrogen and ammonia

All field results

Your lagoon next

This was measured somewhere else.

A different plant, a different loading and a different sludge. What decides your result is how much of your own accumulation is organic and treatable, and whether the dose is sized against the lagoon in front of us rather than read off this page. Tell us the dimensions and we will size it.

Get a dosing planSee the products