S6: New Microbiological Monitoring Techniques for Corrosion Safe Oxidizing Biocides and for Mineral Slurries

The most appropriate and accurate microbiological activity monitoring techniques for establishing and maintaining industrial biocide programs are critical to the success or failure of those programs. They are a challenge to industrial production whose time and resources for microbiological enumeration or for chemical residual methods may be limited. 

For Pulp and Paper, an oxidizing biocide, Monochloro-5, 5-dimethylhydantoin (MCDMH), presents a minimal vapor phase corrosion risk.  It is highly effective against primary-biofilm forming bacteria, the culprit of cleanliness problems.  Primary-biofilm formers cannot be monitored by enumerating with standard bacterial plate counts or ATP methods.  A new monitoring technique called the PiBa assay to specifically measure the biofilm formers will be described.  The PiBa assay allows the implementation of a combined oxidizing biocide program for biofilm control with minimized corrosion risks.

For the production of Mineral Slurries, fast and accurate monitoring is a critical part of the biocide program.  Monitoring allows a decision to re-treat the product or not for storage/shipment, manage risk, detect production issues and reduce costs by fine tuning dosages.  A well validated, 2nd generation ATP technology is presented here in LumiKem Test Kit exclusively through Kemira. It functions via the complete recovery and detection of ATP in these opaque products within less than ten minutes allowing production to assess true biomass concentration and include data and trends in customized software. A case study is reviewed.