Image courtesy AC Fox

Imagine for a moment that you own a factory that makes ethanol fuel from corn. You are a large, industrial manufacturer of corn-based ethanol, and you can make 25 million gallons of ethanol a year.

Because gas prices are so high right now, and because the President and Congress have put a lot of emphasis on ethanol, and because GM is running their huge Go Yellow ethanol ad campaign, you should be sitting pretty. Unfortunately, you have a small problem.

The problem is the river of wastewater that corn ethanol creates. To understand this waste stream, think about the manufacturing process:

Image courtesy U.S. Department of Energy An ethanol plant

• You take corn
• You crush the corn
• You mix the corn with water
• You add enzymes (to turn the corn into simple sugars)
• You add yeast
• You let the yeast ferment the sugars to create alcohol.

So far so good. Now you distill the alcohol out of the water and create a gallon of ethanol that you can sell. That's great too.

The problem is that for every gallon of ethanol you sell, you also create 10 gallons of polluted water. The water that is left over after distillation is full of proteins, sugars, enzymes, bits of dead yeast cells and a little remaining alcohol. What do you do with this polluted water? And keep in mind that there are 10 gallons of polluted water for every gallon of alcohol that you create. So if you are making 25 million gallons of ethanol each year, you have to deal with 250 million gallons of polluted water. Since industrial ethanol plants typically range in size between 25 million and 100 million gallons of ethanol a year, and there are a number of these plants in the United States, you can see that ethanol wastewater becomes a big problem.

Image courtesy Falke Bruinsma A clarifying tank at a sewage treatment plant

But the corn ethanol production process isn't the only manufacturing process that results in wastes and by-products. If you make biodiesel fuel, you get a by-product called crude glycerol that you have to deal with. If you have a food factory you may have a similar problem. Say you make pancake syrup or frozen pizzas, and you use water to clean parts of the assembly line. This water is now polluted, and the local sewage treatment plant may not want it. What are you going to do with it?

Now there's a completely new process available to handle water that is polluted with organic material like proteins, sugars, glycerol or even pizza debris. That process is called Activated Carbon Facilitated Oxidation, or AC FOX. AC FOX has huge advantages over the traditional ways of dealing with "organically contaminated waste streams."

In this article, you will learn all about AC FOX and how it can help manufacturers of a wide variety of products save money, help the environment and speed up their production lines. Let's take a look.

The Advantages of AC FOX
So let's go back to our ethanol factory. The factory creates 10 gallons of wastewater for every gallon of ethanol that it produces. The wastewater contains proteins, sugars, enzymes, DNA fragments and a little left-over alcohol.

How do you get rid of this wastewater? Ethanol plants today usually handle it by evaporating the water and making animal feed from the solids that are left behind. The sale of the animal feed does not cover the cost of evaporating the water, but it does solve the wastewater problem.

Another way to handle the wastewater is to treat it like sewage. Let's look at the sewage approach, since that can be applied to all waste streams that we are talking about. With sewage, you let the water stand in large tanks or holding ponds and you let bacteria eat all the organic material in the water. That works, but there are three problems:

1. The process often takes a lot of space
2. The bacteria are slow
3. The process completely ignores the fuel value of the wastewater

The third problem is key. Any stream of wastewater contaminated with lots of organic material like sugars and proteins can be thought of as a waste fuel. If you could somehow burn this fuel, you could use the resulting heat to do all sorts of things. You might use the heat in part of your manufacturing process, or use it to generate steam and make electricity. One great thing about this heat is that it would be free. Currently you are letting the bacteria eat that fuel, and it is all going to waste.

It turns out that, up until this point, burning wastewater has been impossible. Imagine trying to burn pancake syrup. Pancake syrup contains a huge amount of energy because of all of the sugar, but up until now there has been no way to "burn" it because the water in the syrup makes burning impossible. Even if you dehydrate the syrup and try to burn the dry sugar, it doesn't burn very well.

AC FOX completely changes the equation. The goal of AC FOX is to quickly and efficiently "burn" all of the fuel in any stream of organic wastewater. With AC FOX you can, in fact, "burn" pancake syrup and capture all the heat. You can also "burn" the effluent from your ethanol factory, or glycerol, or water with lots of pizza crumbs dissolved in it. Any organic wastewater stream turns from "sewage" (which is a problem) into "fuel" (which is cool) if you have an AC FOX reactor in your factory.

By "burning" your wastewater, you now have an asset instead of a liability. You can use the free heat created by the AC FOX reactor anywhere in your factory. You can also immediately reuse the water, because it is clean. And you also speed up the whole process. Instead of letting the wastewater stand for days in a settling pond or bacterial digestion tank, you can "burn" the wastewater quickly, as soon as you create it.

Now you can understand why manufacturers are starting to get so excited about AC FOX. Next, we'll see exactly how it works.