At ClearStream Environmental, solving complex water and wastewater challenges means having people on our team who understand both the individual technologies and how those technologies work together as part of a complete treatment process. Travis Zurcher, Senior Applications Engineer and Sedimentation Subject Matter Expert, brings that expertise to our municipal and industrial projects.
Travis has been part of the ClearStream team for five years and brings approximately 15 years of water treatment experience. His background spans a wide range of technologies, including clarifiers, solids contact clarifiers, flocculation, inclined plate clarifiers, dissolved air flotation and oil-water separation.
Today, we’re looking to build on that experience as we continue expanding our capabilities in industrial water and wastewater treatment.
“One of my goals is to ramp up the industrial side and become more of a support to engineers in terms of overall process definition,” Travis said. “It’s about determining what equipment needs to be used to treat industrial wastewaters that are a little more challenging and outside the realm of the typical.”
For us, that means looking beyond an individual piece of equipment. When a customer comes to us with a challenging wastewater stream, we want to help evaluate the characteristics of that water, understand the required effluent quality and determine the treatment process needed to get from point A to point B.
Travis brings experience from both the municipal and industrial sides of the industry. He began his career working with municipal drinking water sedimentation before expanding into dissolved air flotation, oil-water separation and industrial applications. He later worked in applications engineering, helping define treatment processes for industrial projects before joining our team at ClearStream.
Interestingly, wastewater wasn’t originally part of his career plan. Travis studied chemical engineering with an emphasis in electrical engineering and initially hoped to work in semiconductor manufacturing. A career fair ultimately led him into water treatment, where he discovered an industry full of the technical problem-solving he enjoyed.
“I like that there are always unique challenges, especially on the industrial side,” Travis said. “You have to find the right solution and use the right pieces to put together the best solution for the customer.”
As we continue growing our industrial capabilities, we also see opportunities to make greater use of technologies already within our expertise, including dissolved air flotation, while expanding the process knowledge and support we can provide to consulting engineers and customers.
Nearly every industrial process relies on water in some way. By applying the right treatment technologies and processes, we can help customers find opportunities to reuse water, reduce overall water demand and return treated water to the environment while meeting discharge requirements.
For Travis, those changing applications are part of what makes this industry so rewarding.
“The more you learn about the different issues and constituents that become concerns, the more intricate and involved it becomes,” he said. “There’s a lot of fulfillment in solving these problems.”
We’re proud to have Travis’s experience on our team as we continue strengthening ClearStream’s sedimentation expertise and expanding the ways we can help our customers solve complex municipal and industrial water treatment challenges.