EFFLUENT TREATMENT WITH HIGH TECHNOLOGY

As an example of public-private articulation, several years of scientific research work done by the CONICET, have found grounding on a working partnership with a company from Salta, Clark SRL Industries. They are placing on the market equipment designed to treat both household and industrial sewage effluents of different processes.
The piece of equipment maintains its performance even in extreme weather zone, up to 25 degrees below zero. Even under these conditions, it is capable of processing up to 80 % of the COD of the effluent (unit of measure of the organic pollutant), being the only one in the market with these characteristics. “When we learned about the material that had been collected and created in research work for several years and having experience in this area, we quickly found an opportunity to make it come true and make this technology available to the society”, said Darío H. Pellegrini, CEO of the company Clark Industries. The Anaerobic Reactor of Upflow and Sludge Stabilization with Conditioning (RAFAEL-AS), as it is called in the laboratory, is a system capable of working in environments with extremely low temperatures. The system can be modular and adapt to a wide range of waste or effluents.
During a conversation with the Doctor Fidel Pérez, who is the head of the CONICET Technology Link Office, told us that CONICET and Clark Industries have been working, since September 2017, on the industrial development of the technological model designed by the Doctors Lucas Seghesso, Martín Iribarnegaray, Alejandro Hernández and Miguel Condori, researchers from the Research Institute in Non-Conventional Energy (INENCO) under the National University of Salta and CONICET.
Currently, the institutions are in the process of licensing intellectual property so that Clark industries can proceed with its commercialization.
Its fields of application range from the treatment of domestic wastewater as in single-family homes, small villages, industrial enterprises, mining exploitation areas, etc.to the agricultural and industrial field where it can collaborate in the treatment of sewage effluents in tanneries, meat processing plants, poultry and swine clusters, dairy farms, etc. as well as in the industrial area, dairy industries, mills, industries linked to cellulose wastes, breweries, food industry, mining, etc.
The advantages of applying this technology are: to operate independently regardless of the climatic conditions and external temperature; to be modular, both to transport and face future growth of the treatment system itself; to have minimum civil work requirements, facilitating its transportation, logistics or location change; to have high efficiency in biogas production and require up to six times less space than a biodigestor of traditional technology.