A Scandinavian chemical plant intends to secure the future supply of purified water for its production site. At present the make-up is water from a nearby lake, with no or little pre-treatment. Chemicals are added to the cooling tower system in order keep water quality acceptable and a purge from the system is applied to keep salts and other concentrations at a controlled level.

There are challenges with capacity restrictions and clogging in the present system, but as of today the root cause was not fully understood. Also, due to the intention to increase production capacity of the production site and upcoming demand pressure on the nearby lake as water source due to community growth, an additional water source was being sought. After review, a potential secondary water source was identified: the effluent of a nearby communal WWTP, located approximately 1,5 km from the chemical site.

The quality of the effluent was analysed and seemed of good quality to serve as alternative water source. Logisticon advised the customer to consider Ultrafiltration (UF) as preferred technology as pretreatment for a reversed osmosis system (RO is required to achieve the required conductivity levels), due to following reasons:

• UF technology is more robust and has a broad feedwater range (unit could also treat surface water from the lake if required)
• UF requires less pre-treatment of the feedwater and has a higher recovery 
• UF is an excellent pretreatment before reverse osmosis   
• Logisticon has standardised and robust UF units and lot of operational experience
• The UF/RO plants from Logisticon have a high automation level and can be operated via a remote control dashboard

After a joint engineering process, an ultrafiltration plant type UF-2880 and a reverse osmosis (RO) plant type RO-108 were selected and designed. Both plants, with a combined net capacity of 100m³/h RO permeate, are built in 40ft HC containers. The main advantage of 'containerized' solutions is that Logisticon fully tests the complete installations before they are shipped to the customer's site. This approach saves a lot of installation time on site and increases the quality and reliability of the provided solution. To support the customer in operation and maintenance Logisticon can (after approval of the customer) log into the installation and support remotely.

The plant was delivered to the production site and will be installed and commissioned in the coming months.