Eimco Water Technologies will upgrade the existing Terrassa Wastewater Treatment Plant, in Spain, owned by the Catalan Water Agency (ACA). The upgrade will include installation of an IFAS (Integrated Fixed-Film Activated Sludge) system that will be used to improve the plant effluent quality, remove nutrients and increase the capacity of the existing plant by introducing extra biomass growing surface into the bioreactors.

This will remove the need, cost and disruption of civil construction, yet increase the capacity of the plant by 25%. This additional surface area comes from a number of polypropylene biotextiles, installed in stainless-steel structures that will be submerged in the fine bubble aerated zones of the bioreactors.

Eimco is also installing three secondary suction clarifiers (43m diameter) at Terrassa to improve the secondary settlement to help achieve better effluent parameters. The company also provided a full real-scale module to show how the polypropylene biotextiles would operate and to allow oxygen transfer tests, as well as a small pilot biotextile cage to run performance trials.