Industrial wastewater plants conversion for synergy use and the impact of inflows variability

A company, traditionally making brass products, undergone profound changes in the productive process, due to the inclusion of new products made of aluminium. The former industrial wastewater treatment consisted of two independent plants; one for the electroplating process and the other for the vibratory finishing process. The aluminium finishing gave rise to the inability to treat the generated industrial effluent, and consequently to a loss in the industrial production capacity. To overcome this problem, it was implemented an innovative synergistic, high level automated wastewater metal finishing treatment system, connecting both plants and assigning to each, different specific operations in the global process. To ensure and sustain the strict continuous compliance with local discharge limits it was done a set of industrial experiments according to an orthogonal L12 array design, applying innovatively the Taguchi methods and ANOVA, assessing the variability of the various streams of wastewater flows to be treated. The impact of the connection between the two plants was evaluated positively and, for each treated water parameter (pH, chemical oxygen demand, total suspended solids, total chromium, hexavalent chromium, nickel, zinc, copper, aluminium and iron) was found the specific process wastewater inflow that most influence their variability.