Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies Support (VWS), a subsidiary of Veolia Water, is a French water and wastewater treatment company.   VWS owns U.S. Patent No. 7,507,805 (‘805 Patent), which relates to rotary disk filter technology.
VWS recently sued Siemens Industry (Siemens) for patent infringement in the Eastern District of North Carolina, accusing its German competitor of infringing the ‘805 Patent.
According to the complaint (Veolia-Complaint), Siemens’ Forty-X disk filter product infringes claims 1 and 16 of the ‘805 Patent.
The ‘805 Patent is directed to a rotary disk filter having a modular construction. The rotary disk filter (1) has a rotating drum (2) that includes a plurality of disk-shaped filter members (3).Â
The lateral faces of the filter members support a filter cloth (4), which traps particles in the liquid being filtered.
A filter support (11) extends radially outwards from the center of the drum and forms filter segments or modules (13). The modules, as shown in Figure 4 below, have an intermediate support portion (15) and two outer support portions (16) extending from the intermediate support portion.
Two inner support portions (17) extend from the other end of the intermediate support portion (15), which has a framework construction (18) with hollow spaces (19). Openings (20) in the inner support portions (17) allow the liquid to be filtered to pass from the interior of the drum (2).
According to the ‘805 Patent, the modular filter design and support structure provide a lighter filter with higher filtering capacity at a lower manufacturing cost.
The rotary disk filters at issue in this case are used for a variety of applications including tertiary filtration, water reuse, and process water filtration.
