Nuvonic solutions help organizations meet the challenge of managing multiple disinfection providers and scale disinfection as their needs grow.
UV light is a proven disinfection agent for drinking water and wastewater treatment. A variety of technologies are available. The key challenge is to deploy the one that best meets a facility’s disinfection requirements at an affordable cost.
Nuvonic now offers a comprehensive suite of chemical-free disinfection solutions for entire municipal and industrial facilities, covering water, surfaces, and air, if necessary, through advanced UV technologies. The company, a part of Halma Group, combines the UV technologies of Aquionics, Berson, Hanovia, and Orca.
The company says the combined solutions help organizations meet the challenge of managing multiple disinfection providers and scale disinfection as their needs grow. It’s a different approach to selecting technology for pathogen elimination.
Ken Kershner, global commercial director with Nuvonic, talked about the offering in an interview with the Treatment Plant Operator.
TPO: What is the market need Nuvonic is looking to meet?
Kershner: We saw that no global provider was offering a full suite of technologies able to cover a full range of UV disinfection applications. Bringing these four companies together under one roof allows us to provide a global technology suite and support network to handle a facility’s disinfection needs.
Kershner: A company can call one manufacturer and get a disinfection system for drinking water, another for air, another for surfaces, and so on. Then, when they need parts or services, they would have to call each of those companies. Our platform enables customers to make one phone call to get everything they need, from up-front application science to aftermarket parts and service, no matter where they are in the world.
Kershner: When an end user or a consultant, we’re able to give them what we consider to be the best solution. They can see our full suite of solutions all at once. They don’t have to have five different people walk in with different presentations. Through one organization, they’re able to see all the UV technologies, platforms, and configurations, from which they can select what is the most appropriate to the site-specific needs.
Kershner: Hanovia works mostly in the food, beverage market, and industrial sectors and offers medium-pressure lamp systems. Berson focuses on municipal drinking water and wastewater, so all the traditional uses for UV, such as helping a reuse plant meet fecal coliform permit levels. They offer medium, low-pressure, high-output amalgam lamps. Orca treats air and surfaces using low-pressure, high-output amalgam lamps. Aquionics offers technologies across all these applications.
Kershner: They would not typically need to disinfect surfaces, but for air, UV disinfection is a common need for those facilities and, in fact, for municipal buildings of all kinds. These customers want to install UV in their air-handling units to protect customers and employees from airborne pathogens.
Kershner: A UV system would be placed right at the central part of an HVAC system or near the return of every ductwork segment. The air would flow across the UV lamps, which would inactivate the airborne pathogens before they reach the building occupants. It’s all tied into the building control system. It’s simple to install in existing HVAC systems and easily adapted to new construction.
Kershner: Yes. It started with wastewater and drinking water plants calling because people needed to work there every day during the pandemic. As UV became recognized as a solution, we saw an exponential increase in inquiries for municipal applications that continues today.
Kershner: Footprint is a big one. At an existing plant where someone is trying to add a UV system, medium-pressure technology tends to be a good fit since it’s a more compact system. Another consideration is whether the system is gravity flow, where an open channel is typically used, or pressurized, which normally calls for a closed-vessel medium- or low-pressure system. Water quality can play a factor. If there is iron or manganese in the water that can cause fouling, systems with chemical wiping tend to be selected.
Kershner: Sustainability, energy consumption, and carbon footprint is becoming more of an issue. Users want to know how the equipment conforms to sustainability metrics. Different units consume different amounts of energy.
Kershner: We want the customer to tell us what kinds of problems they are experiencing. For example, are they trying to eliminate some kind of biofouling? Or they might not have a problem and they just need to meet a permit. Once we establish why they are calling, we try to understand the upstream and downstream processes. While UV does a certain thing, it has to interact with everything else in the plant. We work with clients to understand how their plant works. Is it a sequencing batch reactor that has a lot of on-off cycles? What else could affect the UV system? Once we know all that, we can make recommendations on which products will be the best fit for them.
Pullout quotes
“Our platform enables customers to make one phone call to get everything they need, from up-front application science to aftermarket parts and service.”
Ken Kershner
“Users want to know how the equipment conforms to sustainability metrics. Different units consume different amounts of energy.”
Ken Kershner
This article was first published in TPO By Ted J. Rulseh
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