PENETRON Helps Scour Salerno Sewage

The Salerno community’s wastewater treatment plant, located just south of Naples on Italy’s renowned Amalfi coast, is one of the first plants in the region to process sewage sludge and purge from sewage and septic tanks. The concrete tanks that carry out the purifying bath are exposed to an extremely hostile environment of the effluent.

Unfortunately, the conditions outside the concrete tanks also quickly became problematic for the project engineer. Confronted with percolating water from aquifers at the construction site and the resulting hydrostatic pressure, the engineer initially considered installation of a membrane to wrap the Salerno plant’s concrete treatment tanks as protection from the elements.

“However, once the complex installation process was reviewed more closely and the extent of the potential costs became obvious, the search for an alternative began,” explains Enricomaria Brac, Director of PENETRON Italy. “They asked us for a solution; we proposed a combination of PENETRON ADMIX and a layer of PENETRON.”

As a crystalline admixture, PENETRON ADMIX is added during batching and provides low permeability, low shrinkage and self-healing properties to the concrete, a highly effective combination for severe groundwater and the aggressive chemical environments encountered in wastewater treatment plants. PENETRON ADMIX was mixed into 200 m³ of concrete used for the foundation slab, the perimeter walls and the roof covering of the Salerno plant.

PENETRON topical material, applied on fresh or existing concrete, provides integral protection to the matrix through formation of insoluble crystals that fill cracks, pores and voids up to a width of 400 microns (0.4mm), identical to the crystalline admixture described above. PENETRON was applied to the positive side of the of the perimeter walls of the sewage treatment tanks for added protection against the aggressive chemicals (pH 3- 11) and to seal any cracks that emerged during the curing stage.

“The ease and simplicity of the PENETRON System also helped accelerate the construction schedule and save project costs over the previously specified membrane product,” adds Enricomaria Brac. “The project engineer was very pleased with the performance of this crystalline combination and they informed us the previous concrete tank would be demolished and replaced with a new tank treated with the PENTRON System!”

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