EnviroMix Named WEF Innovative Technology Award Winner

EnviroMix is honored to announce that BioMix-DC Enhanced Anaerobic Mixing has been selected as a 2022 WEF Innovative Technology Award winner. Each year, the Water Environment Federation (WEF) recognizes up to four outstanding technologies and companies who have introduced new innovative products or services related to the water and wastewater industry. WEF announced the winners earlier this month, and the awards will be presented on October 11 at WEFTEC, the organization’s annual technical exhibition and conference.

Criteria considered for the award include:

• The technology must demonstrate an innovative aspect utilizing new ideas, methods, alterations and/or unique changes from existing systems.
• The technology must have been in full scale operation at a wastewater treatment facility or in a collections system for more than one year, but not more than five years.
• The technology must demonstrate a significant achievement in design, operation, maintenance, or process change resulting in demonstrated long-term water quality improvement.

Launched by EnviroMix in 2021, BioMix-DC optimizes biological phosphorus removal by transforming a traditional anaerobic selector into an intensified fermentation tank by alternating a short mixing cycle with a long deep cycle. The deep cycle stratifies the solids in the reactor to create a fermentation blanket that increases solids retention time and maximizes volatile fatty acid production and utilization. During the short mixing cycle, intermittent mixing of tank contents is provided by bursts of compressed air fired through engineered nozzles located at the floor of the tank. Compared to continuous mechanical mixing in anaerobic zones, BioMix-DC provides energy savings of 90% or greater. Highly adaptable, BioMix-DC is compatible with in-line mixed liquor fermentation, sidestream RAS fermentation, and sidestream mixed liquor fermentation.

In one study, the Warren, MI, WRF upgraded their anaerobic selectors by installing a BioMix-DC system in one of their process trains in order to compare a conventional anaerobic reactor to the in-line fermentation environment created with BioMix-DC. EnviroMix collected comprehensive data from both parallel trains in order to compare performance. Compared to the train running with a conventional mixing regime, BioMix-DC further reduced the effluent soluble phosphorus by 75%, the ferric chloride consumption by 73%, and the mixing input power by 89%. Using DNA analysis, the study also demonstrated that the relative abundance of phosphorus accumulating organisms (PAOs) tripled compared to the conventional process.

Removing phosphorus from municipal wastewater to comply with permitted effluent limits helps protect surface water bodies from disastrous ecological outcomes while recovering a valuable nutrient for reuse as fertilizer. BioMix-DC provides a key innovation to enable water recovery facilities to do their part in delivering a clean future for our critical water resources.

Read about the research that launched and reinforced BioMix-DC Enhanced Anaerobic Mixing System. As part of the WEFTEC 2023 proceedings, the Water Environment Federation published a paper entitled “Unique Approach to Inline Fermentation Stabilizes Biological Phosphorus Removal.” In the paper, EnviroMix’s Sarah Elger and John Koch, along with plant superintendents Bryan Clor and Cody Norwood, review two water resource recovery facilities that upgraded their traditional anaerobic selectors to include inline fermentation with an intermittent mixing strategy to produce VFA for improved biological phosphorus removal. One plant increased phosphorus removal efficiency from 85% to 95%, while the other plant saw consistently lower effluent total phosphorus below 0.2 mg/L.