Ensuring wastewater compliance for increased production
When planning to increase production at a biotech manufacturing site, the project team knew there would be wider implications to operations—details they needed to understand before moving forward.
The client knew that increased throughput would not just mean additional requirements upstream; it would also mean additional demands on the sewage systems downstream. Given the current processes of the existing facility and waste treatment techniques required, this becomes a complex issue to assess. With this challenge, the client’s team turned to CRB’s Process Simulation Specialists to model the increased wastewater projections, ensuring the added capacity would not violate permitted allowances of wastewater to sewage.
Modeling future wastewater and operations
To determine the future waste demand, our consulting team developed a simulation model to account for current wastewater generation and the estimated waste from the additional throughput. This allowed us to identify the theoretical maximum waste generation during normal transient process operations, which is important in identifying instantaneous waste generation and peak loads that could impact waste treatment systems. In addition, we developed a custom accounting system to track concentration levels of sodium hydroxide, phosphate, chloride, nitrogen, and ammonia in the waste. These individual parameters were then checked against the city’s allowable limits of non-infectious waste to ensure compliance.
Accounting for flammable contents
The waste generated at this site happens to be virally active, which requires neutralization before discharging to the public sewer system. Familiar with the underlying impacts of this process, our simulation team went a step further, inspecting the future safety of the facility’s heat-based disinfectant process’ under the increased load. We modeled the maximum and average concentration of flammables in the infectious waste hold vessels, ensuring the flammable content stayed below 1% during normal operations.
This 2-week study was a small but necessary part of the due diligence that allowed our biopharma client to move forward with their expansion project investment with confidence.
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