Water Treatment Fundamentals – Part 4

Transcript

Speaker 1:                           00:00

Create a barrier and stop the things passing through. Let’s get into particulate filtration.

Speaker 2:                           00:10

All right.

Speaker 1:                           00:16

What we’re going to do is create a sieve.

Speaker 1:                           00:20

There’s going to be a number of different ways that we’re going to do this, but all we’re trying to do accomplish is make an opening that smaller than what the thing is we want to take out of it. They six micron particle not pass through a five micron filter. That makes sense. There’s no. That’s not rocket science, right? Everybody understands that, but so we’re. We’re going to do. We’re going to filter out by the means of direct interset, but we’re also. We can also filter things out with by the means of bridging as well, because a lot of these things, if I can stop it on the edge there and I can create bridging now, even though I have particles that are smaller than my opening, I create a filter that will catch smaller things. The most effective filter, the most effective particle filter is one that’s been used for awhile.

Speaker 1:                           01:04

Once I start catching stuff on the outside and building up a filter cake, it becomes a better filter because it’s going to be able to catch more and more stuff on the outside so it becomes more effective. What’s the. What’s the downside to that? For the right for to like Phil said, the downside for the customer is I started building up a filter cake. Now I start plugging and I start back pressure, so that leads to like what they’re saying about I need to replace the filter. I have a great particle filter, but now I have a really low water supply. Filtered starts reducing the amount of water flow that goes through it. I can do this filtration couple of a few different ways. The first way that I can do this level of filtration is what’s called surface filtration. All right? All I want to do is create a media, a surface that has opened that has little doorways in it, and then depending upon what the door size is, I can keep the contaminants out on the other side. Real simple, real straightforward surface filter and example of a surface filter is like a walmart on black Friday, right? You can only get so many people jam through those doors at Walmart in order to go through and get into what’s on the inside. And so the door becomes a real simple film surface filter. It’s the same principle. I’m creating openings to allow what I want to go through or what or do reject what I don’t want to go through

Speaker 1:                           02:35

a couple of versions, pleated paper, so just starting off with real commoditized filters and we’ll surface filters are very simple, very cheap, very inexpensive, are very effective and inexpensive. We’d make a couple of different means of surface filtration we do with pleated paper. Um, we, it with, uh, other membrane materials that we use as well. But again, it’s just a matter of creating a sieve and catching this material on the outside. That’s surface filtration. Let’s go to the next step. I want to talk about depth filtration. So depth filtration is a little bit different. Depth filtration. What I do is I create what’s called a torturous path. I created a torturous path through the filter that catches a variety of different sized materials as it makes its way through. What that does, it gives me a lot of

Speaker 1:                           03:37

capacity versus if I wrapped a sheet of paper around a filter like this, the only surface area that I have is this area that’s around the outside of this filter to catch it. Once I load that up, I’m done. I start back pressuring the filter like this is designed so that it’s catching the big stuff on the outside, but as the water makes its way through to the. Towards the inside, it gets tighter and tighter, so I’m catching contaminants all the way down through the filter so I can get a lot better life out of a depth filter. Benefit here is that I can control my size a lot better. I can control what the filter sizes here better here. It gets a little dicey, can get a little bit more challenging, better control, less cost, higher capacity, better flow rate. Okay. Does that make sense? Surface filter depth, filter. Let’s talk about sizes because I’m talking about a bunch of different things. Particles and things that are in the water. What are the. What’s a micron? Anybody got an idea with them? Yeah, it is a measurement of length. So it’s just. It’s a measurement of length. You knew the answer, jp mine. What’s a millimeter? How big is the millimeter? Pretty small. It’s about the. If you look at your pen, it’s about the width of the tip of your pen. That’s a millimeter. There’s a thousand millimeters in a meter.

Speaker 1:                           05:15

That’s what that means. Millimeter, there’s a thousand of them in a meter. Well, a micron is a millionth of a meter. So there’s a thousand micron in one millimeter. Thousand Micron in one millimeter.

Speaker 2:                           05:34

Okay.

Speaker 1:                           05:35

So that it’s a cat. It’s a. it’s a shortening of micro meter. Okay. So the. Okay. So what does that mean kind of like you, Derek, like. Yeah. Okay, sure. You told me about that. What does that mean size wise? So let’s get an idea what that means size wise. If we go down to one micron, 1000000th of a. That is about the size of a cyst. Okay. Assessed what does assist. Does anybody remember? Anybody ever heard of cryptosporidium okay. Back in 1993. Um, where does, where does Chicago get their water from? Where does Milwaukee get their water from?

Speaker 1:                           06:23

Lake Michigan? Um, Cleveland Lake Eerie, Detroit Lake Huron, surface water. What’s the primary contaminant? Surface water. What kind of content? Particularly including living organisms. Cryptosporidium is what’s called what’s known as a cyst. Hmm. Alright. What are some of these living things there in the water? Let’s go smaller. Let’s talk about viruses. Viruses are about one. Well, if you go 1:10 about one slash 20th. So if viruses are somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundredth of a micron in size, anywhere from 100 to 500, point zero, one point zero. Five microns in size is a virus. That’s a living. It’s. That really does. It doesn’t, you know, it’s, it is a living organism because it gets really can reproduce and grow and everything. But it’s kind of its own unique thing. Bacteria are about a 10th of a micron in size. So if you go point zero, one is a virus. Point one is bacteria.

Speaker 1:                           07:37

One Micron is assist. Is everybody at bread kind of had an understanding of what bacteria is single celled creature, just prowling around, looking to reproduce, right? Just kind of a. it’s life. It’s doing what it’s doing, consumes things we need them. There are bad bacteria. There are good bacteria like California bacteria or bad other bacteria. Good bacteria are about point one micron in size. So if we want to filter them out what size filter we do a membrane, so we need something that’ll get down to point one micron about a 10th of a micron size, a cyst about one micron in size. What it is, is it’s an organism that has like a, it has a shell around it. Um, and it, most of the time it sits dormant. Just kind of sits in the water, doesn’t do a whole lot until it gets into an area that it wants to grow and reproduce.

Speaker 1:                           08:33

Warm, stable. Well cryptosporidium, Giardia. I’m live in the lakes and they are typically filtered out and treated for. We had an outbreak in Milwaukee in 1993. Cryptosporidium got into the water supply and it contributed to a little less than 100 people. 100 deaths. It was like 94 deaths in Milwaukee just caused by the sicknesses of the cysts that were in the water. Good thing about assist is that it’s about one micron size, so even if it’s 1000000th of a meter in size, we can easily make filters that will filter them out. So that’s what a micron is. That’s the. That’s the size we’re dealing with. Any questions?

Speaker 2:                           09:18

All right.

Speaker 1:                           09:20

Still, the main thing is all the things we’ve talked about, our startup particles in the water. If I throw this out in the lake, Michigan, if I throw a city mini out on the lake, Michigan and it’s floating around and I need to filter it out, I’m still going to do it with a filter of some sort. I can do this with chicken wire, right? That chicken wire, it’s going to have a micron rating, right? Somewhere in the 500 micron rating, something like that, thousand microns, but the main thing is this bit of flow of article floating around in the surface water is no different than the virus or the bacteria or the cyst that’s out there either. I just need to create a barrier that stops it passing through, so that’s what we’re going to talk about.