YieldMax
Patent Pending Chloride Removal System For Agriculture
Overview
YieldMax is a turnkey system that targets the removal of chloride from your irrigation or drainage water. Excess chloride in your irrigation water can damage crops. Our system employs a hybrid approach – using conventional technology to adsorb the chloride and a new proprietary adsorbent to sequester the chloride as a solid. Better still, the system is designed to leave < 100 mg/L of chloride in your irrigation water – a safe amount.
Yield Improvement in Irrigation
Nearly all crops need a small amount of chloride for proper growth. But years of intensive crop cultivation around the world have led to an accumulation of chloride ions in ground and surface water. Until the YieldMax, the only way to remove chloride was via reverse osmosis – energy intensive and incredibly wasteful with our water. YieldMax delivers almost 98% of the treated water to your crops. Without the chloride, your nitrogen fertilizer can go straight to the crop without conflict with the chloride ion.
Better yields and less nitrate required = More money in your pocket with each planting
How Our System Helps You
YieldMax Systems offer a wide range of benefits.
System Specifications
| Flow Rate | 2-500 GMP |
| Chloride Removal | 2 to 100% |
| Brine Production | 1-2% of total flow |
| Regeneration Frequency | 8–16 hours |
| Regenerant Solution | 10% ammonium bicarbonate |
| pH of Irrigation Water | 3–9 |
Note: Most drainage water contains more than enough phosphorus for denitrification to proceed. It is standard practice to add a small amount of phosphorus to insure we meet the nitrate:phosphorus ratio requirements.
How it Works
Front End – Ion Exchange
Similar to a water softener in operation (see figure 1), our ion exchange module adsorbs chloride (and other anions if they are present). The bicarbonate ions are displaced by chloride and the “bicarb” is released into your irrigation water. While this will increase bicarb ions in your irrigation water, the bicarbonate can be easily neutralized by lowering the pH of the treated water using simple addition of an acid.
Back End – Brine Management
Once the ion exchange tanks are close to full of chloride and possibly other anions, the regeneration process starts. We normally schedule this to happen every 12 hours. This time period allows you to process a day’s worth of irrigation sets without stopping. Once the system is halted, irrigation water will bypass the system while the tanks are regenerated. This process takes about 2 hours.
While the system is paused, the regeneration process starts. A 10% ammonium bicarbonate solution, followed by a water rinse, is pumped counter-current into the tanks, replacing the chloride and other anions with bicarbonate ions. The raw brine is collected in the brine processor (see Figure 2).
While your system begins operation again, we further process the stage 1 brine through a second small module that separates the brine into two solutions (see figure 3): a) chloride brine, and b) a nutrient brine containing any other anions that were adsorbed.
You may be able to collect and haul away the chloride brine to your local wastewater treatment plant. If this is not feasible, we can add our adsorbent unit that will bind all of the chloride into a solid. The solid adsorbent is separated from the water/ ammonia solution, allowing all the liquid to be reused.
System Components
The system has five major components:
The pre-treatment consists of one or more particulate filters. The ion exchange module
contains:
- Ion Exchange Resin Tanks
- Supply Pump
The brine processing module contains the ammonium bicarbonate supply and pump, and a separations module that creates the two smaller brine 2 and brine flows.
The optional chloride adsorption module contains a mixing tank, adsorbent supply, and solid liquid separation unit.
Control and communications of the system is run by an industry standard programmable action controller.
System Design & Configuration
Overview
The design process starts with a standard irrigation suitability report for your irrigation water. This report is used to configure the static and dynamic parameters needed to size and control your system. The report also includes a detailed analysis of the treated water and brine. See figure 4 for an example.
Once we have the design parameters, we can provide you a detailed cost estimate for the system. Additional permits and other site work may be required to integrate our system into your existing irrigation and nutrient control system.
In figure 4, we see that the total flow of 100 GPM has been separated into two streamsa treated stream at 60 GPM and an untreated bypass stream of 40 GPM. Note that this customer will see their chloride, nitrate, and sulfate drop by about 60% as the ion exchange systems adsorbs 60% of the total. As the anions are adsorbed, they will displace bicarbonate ions (HCO3) into your water.
Note: This system design output diagram does not show the effect of our brine processing subsystem (reduces total brine to approximate 1 to 2 percent of total flow.
Optimizing the System Design
We can help you optimize the system design and operational costs for the most cost effective solution. The most important factors for optimization are:
- The blending strategy to minimize the amount of water to be treated
- Regeneration time schedule to match your daily irrigation sets
- Optimize the brine processing to reuse as much of the water and ammonium bicarbonate as possible.
Acquiring Our System
There are three methods for acquiring our systems. These are:
The subscription method has the lowest up front cost to you but requires a monthly payment. It is similar to a lease but a big difference is that we do all maintenance and repairs.
Purchasing a system eliminates the monthly subscription payment but you must choose how you will maintain your system. We can do some of this for you with an extended maintenance contract.
For customers that need to install multiple systems, we can develop a licensing agreement that gives you the right to assemble, build, and operate our Biotreat systems. This is the overall lowest cost of acquisition (CAPEX) and operating costs (OPEX).
