Tubular Membrane Water Treatment Solutions

Package Membrane Plants

PCI innovatively introduced Package Membrane Plants (PMPs) for the Fyne process, offering the following features:

As the PMPs are supplied as complete treatment processes incorporating all the necessary peripheral items, they simply require positioning within a building and connection to services before final performance validation. Full instrumentation can be incorporated to enable unattended monitoring and limited site attendance. Custom engineered plants are offered for larger capacities and/or specific customer requirements. 

Tubular Membrane Filtration Technology

PCI ‘s C10 tubular series modules and their 12mm diameter tubular membranes – against Spirals (0.8mm) or hollow fibre (1.2mm) – are used in the Fyne process due to their ability to handle suspended solids without blocking. The tubular membranes retain contaminants on the raw water side and allow potable water to permeate through the membrane. The deposition of impurities upon the membrane’s surface is minimised by maintaining a high crossflow velocity using a partial re-cycle flow, thereby sustaining high filtration efficiencies. As the process’ waste stream is simply concentrated raw water, there are no environmental concerns to prevent the return of the concentrated waste stream back to the local water course.

Membrane Cleaning

The membranes are routinely cleaned using a mechanical pigging technique employing natural foam rubber balls. The foam ball cleaning of a membrane was developed by PCI as a way to simplify the cleaning process as well as helping to reduce overhead costs. The mechanical pigging technique can be automated, thereby reducing operators attendance and costs as well as minimising chemical consumption and waste disposal. This innovative technique affords lower chemical costs per year.

After a predetermined operational time the plant’s flow direction is automatically reversed, causing the balls to be passed along the length of the membrane tubes and scouring the accumulated deposits from the membrane surface. The removed deposits are discharged via the waste stream to the local water course.

This unique feature makes the Fyne Process more environmentally sensitive than all conventional treatment alternatives. Although a number of disposal options are available to the Water Authority, waste disposal issues are site specific and require consent from the appropriate environmental authority. As the process’ waste stream is simply concentrated raw water, there are no environmental concerns to prevent the return of the concentrated waste stream back to the local water course.

The membrane treatment plants provide a robust and reliable treatment process for use in remote locations, which require little to no operator input. Operator input is required to monitor the plant, batch-up chemicals, take regular samples and on occasion chemically clean the membranes.

The biggest difference for the operator is in the number of required facility visits. The saving to be gained is even greater for the most remote sites, where operators spend significant amounts of time traveling between treatment works. An additional benefit, is that overhead costs are lowered with the number of water quality failures being reduced, allowing staff to go about their normal duties. PCI have also extended their membrane life guarantees from the 1 year period offered on the early plants to 3-5 years offered on the more recent plants, reducing the overall membrane plant OPEX. Experiences in Scotland and other countries show that some membrane plants have benefited from significantly longer membrane life than the increased guaranteed life of 3-5 years, which will further reduce operating costs.

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