Continuous Flow Organic Wastes
Pilot Plant Design
RICHARD A. WOODLEY, Director
THOMAS F. BROWN, Assistant Director
Environmental Engineering Department
Commercial Solvents Corporation
Terre Haute, Indiana 47808
INTRODUCTION
Commercial Solvents Corporation's (CSC) Dixie Chemical Plant is located in the
northeast portion of Louisiana on the Ouachita River in the small town of Sterlington. This
plant is the producer of several products for the agricultural and industrial chemicals
industries, these being primarily ammonia, nitric acid, nitroparaffins, and nitroparaffin
derivatives. Since CSC is the only producer of the nitroparaffin products in the world, the
particular raw waste waters discharged from these facilities are unique to this company.
CSC had provided waste water control facilities for several years in the form of acid-caustic
neutralization, equalization to prevent slug discharge, oil removal and control, and thermal
decomposition of highly concentrated waste streams. In addition, the moderately
contaminated process waters have been segregated from the uncontaminated cooling
waters over the years to form two separate discharges. It was the former waste mixture
which was the subject of our investigations.
This mixture had the following raw average characteristics:
Flow — 1 Mgd
COD — 2500 mg/l
BOD — 1500 mg/l
pH — 6.0 - 9.0
N03(N) — 300 mg/l
NH3(N) — 250 mg/l
It was known from past experience that this waste mixture was, in fact, biodegradable
Investigations into alternative treatment methods were made initially. These included land
application, carbon absorption, precipitation-sedimentation, distillation, process
modification to alleviate waste discharge, and others, as well as biological treatment. The
biological approach proved the most promising and economical. The question that
remained was, could the wastes be adequately treated in a biological system and, if so. how?
Firstly, the various biological treatment alternatives were condensed due to various
physical constraints such as land availability, controllability, anticipated future
requirements, etc. The advantages of a compact facility located on the existing production
plant site became apparent.
The use of basic design parameters (most of which originate from the treatment of
domestic sewage) can be costly and risky. Since the waste in question was completely
different from a typical domestic waste and from most other industrial wastes, it was
decided that the system be designed from actual treatability studies which we would
perform ourselves. The results of these studies proved vital to the design of the system, not
only from an efficiency and economical standpoint but from a workability standpoint as
well. It is the purpose of this paper to describe what we believe to be a workable laboratory
scale pilot plant system and program which is adaptable to many types of situations,
economically reasonable, and reliable in the information obtained.
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