09-09: An Integrated Approach to Water Reuse

Limited water resources combined with wastewater discharge concerns have made water reuse a growing focus of the industry. Industrial cooling towers have long been seen as an ideal repository for wastewater because of the large volumes of water necessary for evaporative cooling. However, the use of wastewater as a source of cooling tower makeup water can result in significant corrosion, deposition and biological fouling issues. To address these issues at a major corn processing plant, a creative combination of mechanical and chemical approaches was employed to make a process wastewater suitable for use as cooling tower makeup water. This paper will discuss both the approach to the wastewater pretreatment and the chemical treatment used as the cooling tower.