High-quality Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD), Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD), and Total Organic Carbon (TOC) data is fundamental to effective water management and treatment across a diverse range of industries.
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BOD, COD, and TOC are primary parameters for evaluating water and wastewater’s organic strength. Rapid and dependable identification of changes in organic content and composition is key to industries and municipalities avoiding potentially harmful outcomes in terms of operational health, water quality, increased costs, and public impact.
Faster UV-Vis spectrophotometry-based analysis is beginning to replace conventional lab-based BOD, COD, and TOC methods, with ABB’s UviTec family at the forefront of this shift due to its capacity to deliver accurate results in as little as five seconds, versus five days for a standard lab-based test such as BOD.
A new whitepaper from ABB looks at this industry-wide shift in more detail, outlining several applicable examples of its UviTec systems for municipalities and industries, including:
- Safely avoiding overdosing treatment chemicals when no reliable and relevant data is available, for example, excessive coagulant dosing
- Ensuring that treatment efficiency is not compromised when sudden high loads of organics (slugs) are received at the treatment plant, for example, overwhelming biological treatment
- Avoiding product loss through spills and leaks that have historically taken several hours to detect and address without proper monitoring in place
Water quality data’s value diminishes with each minute spent waiting for results, potentially posing risks to public health, the environment, and treatment operations.
An operator’s capacity to effectively manage water and control treatment processes is compromised when analysis is delayed. Real-time and accurate water quality data is key to the optimization of chemical dosing, treatment, and energy consumption, as well as cost savings in various areas.
Measuring organic compounds individually is difficult and expensive, prompting the industry standard to leverage aggregate parameters such as BOD, COD, and TOC to provide an indication of water’s organic strength. These parameters are used universally in water and wastewater analyses, but all three have a number of limitations.
Water composition can change in a matter of seconds. For instance, municipal wastewater treatment plants receiving residential wastewater as a baseline would be significantly impacted when faced with unexpected slugs of industrial wastewater discharge.
Spill or leak events in industrial production can cause issues for both manufacturing and wastewater operations. Unanticipated fluctuations and contamination risks can also pose a major threat.
There is generally only a small window in which to see this happening, meaning that only acquiring measurements periodically significantly risks high-impact events being missed. This can potentially lead to expensive and often catastrophic results.
For example, a product spill event in the dairy industry typically lasts only a few minutes, but this event causes significant shifts in the organic strength of the wastewater. Events like this can easily overwhelm the wastewater treatment system when missed, leading to the imposition of surcharges.
Real-time analysis immediately provides reliable, actionable data, enhancing process control, increasing confidence in results, and ensuring that nuanced data can be leveraged to improve efficiency.
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Acknowledgments
Produced from materials originally authored by Kerim Kollu, PhD, P. Eng. from ABB Measurement & Analytics.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by ABB.
For more information on this source, please visit ABB.