ACO Marine opens new opportunities for waste water re-use

ACO WM3

MARCH 9, 2015 — Prague, Czech Republic, headquartered wastewater treatment systems specialist ACO Marine has launched a  water recovery system that gives vessel owners greater capacity to reuse the treated effluent from wastewater treatment plants.

The ACO Water Maker WM3 converts treated waste water into pure distilled technical water for such applications as general surface cleaning, laundry, showering, toilet flushing and engine cooling.

The unit, which has extremely low energy consumption, reduces a ship’s need to take on fresh water in port or to make its own water through reverse osmosis or flash evaporation – both high energy consumers.

Suitable for use onboard all vessel types, it can be easily retrofitted to ACO Marine’s Maripur and Clarimar wastewater treatment solutions in addition to third party systems. A typical unit has a footprint about the same size as that of a small domestic refrigerator, with water-making capacities ranging from 6,000 to 24,000 liters per day.

“We have received a lot of interest in this innovative system, from the German Navy to Greenpeace,” said ACO Marine Managing Director Mark Beavis. “It is environmentally-friendly and very cost effective. The smallest unit can even run solely on solar power.”

The water maker reduces the kilowatt power per liter of water produced compared with conventional methods and can cut wastewater dumping significantly. The unit also fullfils the function where vessels require freshwater generation redundancy.

“By enabling treated wastewater to be converted back into pure distilled technical water or even drinking water, the WM3 closes the water treatment loop,” Mr. Beavis said. “The sterilization process is so effective that all types of produced water can be stored in vessel holding tanks for at least 120 days without any further treatment.”

The ACO WM3 uses a hybrid technology of asymmetric selective membrane separation (THASMS) to treat any type of input water and remove all forms of biological, bacteriological, mineral, gas or toxic contamination. There is no requirement for any chemicals.

The water is sterilized more than ten times by a combination of several technologies, including non-chemical sterilization by ozone. A special function of the WM3 unit is that it removes dead bacteria.

The entire process is controlled by an integral computer and ACO Marine’s in-house software. The processed water contains no bacteria (living or dead), undesirable metals and toxins, or other forms of pollutant.

The unit can also take this one step further and add minerals to produce mineral-balanced, drinking water.