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The customer is a processor of top quality organic and conventional raisins, packed for export around the globe and domestically in South Africa in either bulk or retail packaging.
Situated along the Orange River in the Northern Cape, it is the leading organic producer and processor in South Africa. All farms under the management are 100% organic certified and produces organic product only.
The company was established in 2006 and it can process up to 25,000 tonnes of organic and conventional raisins annually.
The Northern Cape province is a very dry area, in which the main source of water comes from the Orange river. The Orange river has a very loaded water that can change a lot from the dry season to the wet season (summer). Especially during the summer the quality of the water is very poor, with a lot of suspended solids in a very wide range of sizes.
This condition, together with the intense Sun radiation, generates water that is very difficult to be filtered, which has a very high clogging potential for micro sprinklers.
In this case, the customer has a pond where he stores the water. The only problem on the pond is the proliferation of organic matter due to the high radiation and the type of water.
Another problem we did face in this case is the drain manifold. As the water is a very valuable resource in this area, the customer wanted to return the back-wash water to the storage pond.
This point makes us send the water around 7 m up and around 50 m away. This increases the pressure on the drain manifold, during backwash, up to 1 bar (approx). However, the customer wants to work at the lowest possible pressure, in order to reduce energy consumption and also to have smaller (and cheaper) pumps.
The best solution is therefore the AZUD HELIX AUTOMATIC disc filtration system; in this case we did choose 2 filter banks AZUD HELIX AUTOMATIC 4DCL6/10FX 200MG, for a flow rate of 360 m3/h.
A very robust system able to deal with very loaded water and to perform a correct backwash even if the differential pressure between outlet manifold and drain manifold is not too high.
One of the main advantages of AZUD HELIX AUTOMATIC is the 3D filtration. Thanks to the forms of the disc, this type of filtration is specially recommended for water with a large organic matter content, as is the case.
On the other hand, the system is also able to backwash only with 1.5 bar differential pressure between the outlet and the drain manifold. As we had 1 bar of pressure on the drain, we designed the system to work only at 2.5 bar on the outlet manifold.