During the Watec exhibition in Tel Aviv Aqana BV was officially launched. Aqana BV is a joint venture between Dutch Water technologies BV from Leeuwarden and Aqwise from Israel. The new water technology company Aqana is located on the Watercampus in Leeuwarden. Under the name DANA, Aqana is bringing an innovative biological waste water treatment technology to the market. Simultaneously, Aqana will be launching DACS, an innovative and economic breakthrough for anaerobic water treatment.
The DANA technology stands for ‘Dynamic ANaerobic Aerobic’ system. The new technology has the big advantage of being cheaper than other systems, more robust and can easily be embedded into existing infrastructure. This means that with a much smaller investment than previously required, a faster and easier full biological waste water treatment can be implemented that produces energy in the form of biogas. This biogas can in turn be used as a replacement for natural gas in for example the production process. The management and operation of an Aqana installation is easier and requires less attention than other systems. Aqana installations are straight forward, stable and reliable ‘energy plants’.
As part of the DANA technology, the ‘DACS’ concept is launched at the same time. DACS stands for Down-flow Anaerobic Carrier based System. Advantages are that it is simple and robust and can be inexpensively applied to a system that is entirely focused on the anaerobic part of DANA technology. DACS is especially designed to apply the anaerobic process in a simple tank. Also existing tanks can use the DACS concept with very little modification. With this, Aqana introduces the cheapest anaerobic waste water technology in terms of both investment and operation.
The technique has been developed over the last four years by the Israeli company Aqwise, Dutch Water Techologies BV from Leeuwarden and the Noordelijke hogeschool Leeuwarden (NHL). The development was supported by a ‘Eureka R&D subsidy’.
The technology is based on an anaerobic and aerobe sludge growing on synthetic base material: a smart synthetic tube on which the bacteria grow. The ‘sludge carrier technology’ was brought to the project by Israeli company Aqwise. The anaerobe treatment technology comes from the Dutch Water Technology BV.
The NHL supported the research through process engineers. They assisted in the engineering of the test installation andthe execution of the tests.
Aqana is now working on the design of further installations in the World and the implementation of their first client in Germany. “The expectation is that more assignments will follow”, says Managing Director Reimond Olthof from Aqana. “Through the intensive collaboration with our Israeli partner, Aqana can deliver the DANA technology to licensed partners of Aqwise and these are worldwide”.
Aqana is located on the Watercampus Leeuwarden where a cluster of universities, companies and government develop on the theme of water technology. All the parties work together within the Water Alliance collaboration.
Source: WaterAlliance, November 29, 2011
