Client: North Carolina Coastal Development
Solution: Fluidyne FFP ™ Fixed Plate Tertiary Cloth Media Filter
Background:
An existing coastal residential development and golf complex near Morehead City, NC had an existing traveling bridge sand filter that had been slowly failing for a number of years. Operators were required to perform extensive and sometimes costly maintenance on the aging mechanical bridge and sand cleaning mechanisms on a weekly - and sometimes daily - basis, to keep the numerous moving parts, pumps, and complicated mechanics operational. The plant was also looking to upgrade from chlorination to UV disinfection, which requires consistently low levels of TSS to operate efficiently and effectively.
The contract operations company, in coordination with local regulators and engineers, agreed that Fluidyne’s Fixed Plate (FFP™) cloth media low-head filter system offered the required tertiary/reuse quality treatment while providing operators with several key advantages when compared to conventional sand filtration or other types of cloth media filtration, including disc type cloth media filters.
Fluidyne’s FFP™ system relies on a combination of 2 important design features; 1) the fixed plate design uses already available differential head to produce backwash flow vs. mechanically produced head via pumps and 2) uses of the latest cloth media technology that does not require excessive pressurized spray or backwash volume to clean the cloth media fabric.
FFP™ systems use simple open-close pneumatic valves that control the filtering and backwash operations. The position of the two valves associated with each filtering element determines the direction of flow, therefore NO pumps are needed to create backwash flow, which allows media panels to remain fixed in place (instead of rotated past a stationary spray or suction manifold). Having fixed panels also allows FFP™ elements to be square or rectangular (vs. circular) easing manufacture, installation, removal, and maintenance, while maximizing treatment area within the tankage footprint.
Fixed Plate cloth filters operate using gravity, requiring only small water level differential to push water through the filter cloth, making it ideally suited for treatment facilities located in low lying areas or where available gravity head is limited. Furthermore, filtering elements can be isolated from the remaining elements and removed without the need to discontinue flow to the entire filter or divert flow during routine maintenance or inspections.
These advantages all combined to provide a tertiary treatment system that is easy to use, easy to maintain, was inexpensive to purchase and operate, and produces the reuse quality effluent treatment needed in this application.