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Solar-Powered Circulators
Provide Barrier
The prevention of odors escaping from storage ponds is problematic. Even an occasional lapse in maintaining an effective odor cap can have dire consequences including health hazards, public outrage, and even shutdowns. Such scenarios are not limited to sludge storage ponds. Industrial storage basins holding manufacturing effluents, and even rainwater, contain odor-producing sulfurous compounds that can waft over communities unless capped effectively. "We are very concerned about maintaining an odor cap," says David Williams, Project Engineer at Shell Oil for the Martinez, California refinery. "Our pond is about 1/4 mile from the residential community. We've got a delicate situation where even just a slight amount of odor could arouse complaints from the community."
The solution was the SolarBee, a solar-powered water "circulator" from Pump Systems that aerates ponds by circulating the top two feet of water at a rate of up to 10 000 gpm. This circulation occurs with a gentle, "near laminar" long-distance flow pattern that provides an oxygenated odor cap across the entire surface 24 hours a day. This solution provided impressive cost savings. "Because the wastewater treatment pond is at a remote location, we had been using rented diesel generators to power the brush aerators," Mr. Williams explains. The alternative of powering the site from the grid would have cost a fortune due to the remote location and electrical classification. Williams reports that since the installation of the circulator systems, the Martinez pond "has had zero odor complaints due to inadequate aeration."
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Mr. William's concern about wastewater odor control led him to looking
for a new aeration technology to replace two brush aerators that had been
attributed to incidents that produced odor complaints from local residents.
