Fixed Film Pretreatment of Winery Wastewater Using BioCOIRT

Abstract

In this paper, the authors describe the permitting, design, installation and start-up of the Bio- COIR filter for the process wastewater from a new winery in Williamson County, TN. After initial grape pressing, juice is moved to a vessel called a primary for fermentation. It is here lees are produced. Lees are mainly dead yeast cells and other fine sediment. After a period of three weeks to three months, the wine is siphoned off the sediment to another vessel called a secondary. After this process, the vessels are washed and any remaining lees are washed out to the wastewater treatment system. Lees create a high biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS) wastewater. Previous winery wastewater treatment projects show that process water BOD and TSS can be lowered to manageable levels with the use of multiple tanks in series. Commercial effluent filters in each tank assist in the reduction of effluent TSS. A subsequent tank is utilized as the advanced treatment system recirculation/dosing tank. It is equipped with a pressure filter to provide additional filtration before dosing to two BioCoir Advanced Treatment modules. The BioCoir modules comprise a fixed media filter. The BioCoir media consists of short and medium coconut husk fibers. These natural fibers are long lasting and durable. The final effluent is discharged to a final dosing tank where it is dosed to a low-pressure pipe (LPP) system. This LPP is sized based solely upon the hydraulic demands since the organic issues were addressed by the settling tanks and the BioCoir filters.