Technology of purifying and disinfecting ballast water

Abstract

The paper considers the problem of transferring microorganisms with ballast water used in the ship operation. It is noted that the search for a solution to the above problem takes a significant amount of time and requires developing special purifying equipment for disinfecting ballast water. Currently, there are various plants ensuring the decreased number of microorganisms in the process of disinfection. There has been proposed a new technology for ballast water treatment and decontamination that involves depositing microorganisms, removing them from the total volume of ballast water followed by ozone treatment. Actually, the volume of water containing sediment and decontaminated with ozone is significantly less than the total volume of ballast water and makes up about 3-5% of it. Microorganisms depositing takes place due to coagulation and sedimentation. The diagram of the ballast water purification and disinfection technology has been presented. The basic circuit of the ballast water disinfection plant includes a ship's ballast tank, receiving pipeline, reagent tank, metering pump, coagulant, collector, bulkhead, contact column, ozone generator, dehydration device and ultraviolet lamps. The operating conditions of the ship plants have space and time limits. The above technological solutions infer carrying out some operations (coagulation, sedimentation) and disinfection by using the ultraviolet lamps inside the ballast tanks for saving space. The proposed technology can be applied both on board a ship and in the floating or onshore environmental protection equipment, for example, in the port facilities.