The company is a producer of organic and conventional raisins of the highest quality, for export worldwide and also domestically in South Africa, whether in bulk or retail.
Located along the Orange River in the Northern Cape, it is South Africa’s leading organic producer. All the farms under its management are 100% certified organic and produce only organic products.
The company was founded in 2006 and can process up to 25,000 metric tons of organic and conventional raisins per year.
Farming: Raisins
The Northern Cape Province is a very dry region, where the main source of water is the Orange River. The Orange River carries heavily loaded water, and its characteristics can vary significantly between the dry season and the wet season (summer). Especially during the summer, water quality is very poor, with a large amount of suspended solids in a wide range of sizes.
This condition, combined with the intense solar radiation in the area, results in water that is very difficult to filter and poses a very high risk of clogging the Micro-sprinklers.
In this case, the customer has a pond where they store water. The only problem with the pond is the proliferation of organic matter due to high radiation levels and the Type of water.
Another issue we face in this case is the drainage manifold. Since water is a very valuable resource in this area, the client wants to send the backwash water to the storage tank.
This causes us to send the water about 7 m upward and about 50 m away, which increases the pressure in the drainage manifold during backwashing to approximately 1 bar. However, the customer wants to operate at the lowest possible pressure, in order to reduce energy consumption and also to have a sizing smaller and more economical pumps.
The best solution for this scenario is the disc filtration system HELIX AUTOMATIC WEIR, In this case, we selected two AZUD HELIX AUTOMATIC 4DCL6/10FX DLP 200MG filter units, for a flow rate of 360 m³/h.
A very robust system capable of treating heavily contaminated water and performing a proper backwash even if the differential pressure between the Outlet manifold and the drain manifold is not too high.
One of the main advantages of AZUD HELIX AUTOMATIC is its 3D filtration. Thanks to the disc’s geometry, this type of filtration is especially recommended for water with high levels of organic matter, as is the case here.
In addition, the system can also backwash with a differential pressure of just 1.5 bar between the outlet and the drain manifold. Since we have a pressure of 1 bar in the drain, we designed the system to operate at only 2.5 bar at the Outlet manifold, thereby optimizing energy consumption as much as possible.
