Groupe Berlie-Falco Inc. products

Quebec City has 5 belt filter presses on site purchased from Berlie Technologies Inc. These presses currently dehydrate the municipal sludge from a population of approximately 600,000 people. This amount of primary wastewater treatment sludge, which is currently of 50 dry metric tons per day, corresponds to the capacity of 2 ½ of the 5 belt filter presses installed, each of which has a belt width of 2.5 meters. This sludge is dehydrated from approximately 5% in solids content at the inlet to approximately 27% at the outlet.This amounts to a belt loading of about 745 pounds of dry solids per meter of belt width per hour. The dehydrated sludge is then conveyed to the rotary dryers and, finally, to the incinerator as an additional fuel source of which the calorific value is estimated to be of 13.4 MJ/Kg.

The Bristol Waste Water Treatment Works in Avonmouth, UK, operates since 2008 a belt dryer evaporating approximately 3 tons of water per hour heated with steam that is heated by exhaust gases from generators. The sludge to be dried comes from an advanced anaerobic digestion and its biogas is used in the generators to make electricity. The final dried product is broken down to desired sizes to be used as a Class A fertilizer.

At the VfA Verein für Abfallentsorgung plant (VfA Association for Waste Disposal) in Buchs, Switzerland, a filter press dryer is in operation to dewater and dry the sludge from the flue gas desulphurization process of a waste incineration plant. The press is built with 59 PP membrane plates of 1200 mm in size and produces 300 dry metric tons per year of cake at 70% solids content. It operates at a rate of 3 cycles on each 24 hour day, with very minimal supervision.