Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC, Sri Lankan market leader in beer, has been brewing the legendary Lion Beer for more than 160 years. On behalf of Steinecker GmbH, Limburg Filter built a dewatering system for kieselguhr sludge for the Brewery based on a fully automatic filter press, thereby replacing the manual operation which was in place.
Kieselguhr is a filter aid that makes beer clear. It consists of skeletons of diatoms and functions like a tiny sponge. The kieselguhr powder is added to the unfiltered beer. The beer is then pumped through a filter so that the powder binds the last remaining yeast, proteins and other suspended matter. Once the filter is saturated, the kieselguhr layer is rinsed off.
The kieselguhr sludge remaining after rinsing is waste. In dry form, however, the product can be used in a variety of ways, for example as a raw material for bricks, as a soil fertiliser in agriculture or as a filler in road construction. Lion Brewery (Ceylon) PLC has been able to repurpose this as an inclusion in cement bricks. The resulting bricks have a higher strength and a finer surface finish given the low particle size of kieselguhr.
For foreign companies like Lion Brewery, the system is built in a shipping container and extensively tested in our workshop before transport. On site, the container serves as permanent accommodation for the system and is ready for operation within a few days. The system is designed to require minimal maintenance and is an economical solution towards waste repurposing.