NASA Parachute Refurbishment Facility (PRF) Wastewater Treatment
If you mention parachutes and NASA's space program, probably the first image that comes to mind is the Space Shuttle landing on the runway at very high speed, deploying a parachute to bring it to a stop.
But that is not the only parachute in the NASA inventory. The enormous solid rocket boosters that propel the Shuttle into space have their own parachutes, which help slow the descent of the boosters from 360 mph to 50 mph prior to splashdown in the open ocean.
Cleaning these 100' long parachutes for reuse on another shuttle mission is a big challenge. Once they have been recovered by ships, the parachutes are brought to NASA's Parachute Refurbishment Facility located in the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
After rinsing off the salt water and contaminants, the parachutes are untangled and hung on an overhead monorail which transports them to in-line washers and driers. As the fabric is pressure spray-rinsed, the rinse water is collected and treated for re-use.
The rinse water posed a problem for NASA. Before 1994, under local EPA regulations, the rinse water was discharged into a drainage ditch, which emptied into the wetlands of the surrounding Merritt Island National Wildlife refugee.
But with advent of new environmental laws, this waste water — which contains fuel residuals, salts and silicone — was now considered industrial waste. In other words, NASA could no longer discharge its waste waters to nearby surface waters and would have to either treat the water on site or pipe it to a distant treatment facility.
NASA opted for a closed-loop water reuse system which would not only be more cost effective than continued treatment and discharge, but more environmentally responsible.
Today the rinse water, which contains special detergents, oils, fuels, salts, and silicone lubricants, is collected and treated for reuse. Ozone technology available from Water Energy was selected to treat the waste water because ozone leaves no residual chemicals yet it breaks down organic compounds so they are more easily removed. The ozone approach for water treatment and reuse has been a resounding success at NASA since 1994 and continues to be in use today.
