Summary for evaporation for plating waste water Discussion
Evaporation for plating waste water is the core issue here: Sarah Smallwood says EPA pressure and city limits are making it harder to discharge rinse waters, so she wants a practical way to evaporate them without constant babysitting. She reports that a polypropylene evaporator failed after two months, and that her current electric-heater setup raises rinse water to 195°F with air agitation, but the acids eventually damaged the heaters. She is considering splitting the waste streams into separate tanks—one for sulfuric anodize with Teflon heaters and another for hydrochloric-acid electroplating with a different heater—and asks whether that would work or if there is a better, more cost-effective approach. Dominik Michalek offers a brief alternative suggestion: he says they may consider retardation separation as an option, but no further details or comparison are provided in the thread.
Q. As everyone knows the EPA is cracking down and therefore the cities are making it more difficult to push our rinse waters through the city. So I am looking to Evaporate my rinse waters. I have tried a polypro Evaporator but no luck; it went out 2 months later and I don’t have the time to babysit a huge machine when we are so small a company. Right now I use Electric Heaters, bringing the rinse waters to 195° F with air agitation. I had some trouble after a few months because of the acids eating at the heaters. I want to separate the rinse waters from my two main lines and see if I can put my Sulfuric Anodize line in one tank with Teflon heaters and my Electro line with hydrochloric acids in another tank with a different type of heater. I do not know if this will work and I am open to new ideas that will be more cost effective and feasible for my company.
Sarah Smallwood
Director Of Operations – Garland, Texas, USA
January 24, 2012
You may consider to use retardation separation as an option.
Kind regards
Dominik Michalek
– Melbourne, VIC, Australia