The Power of Water: Solving water challenges in the Power Industry

Power plants are mega-consumers of water, and cooling towers take the lot within those plants. The inherent function of cooling towers raises the potential for scaling and corrosion because of the resulting higher levels of dissolved solids. Cooling towers discharge some of the water in the form of blowdown to maintain the salts concentration in the water. But that hardly solves the challenge and also creates another one.

Due to the water crisis, water discharge regulations, and water costs, power plants constantly need to minimize their water consumption while reusing as much water as possible. The way to do so is to reduce the amount of makeup water and blowdown from the cooling tower. An alternative is to treat blowdown water to enable its reuse in various applications. Blowdown treatment is vital, mainly if the disposal is costly or the water discharge is bound to regulations. The blowdown stream is often mixed with effluents from other systems (RO/ EDI/IX) in the power plant. It is characterized by a high scaling potential of sparingly soluble salts such as silica, calcium carbonate, and calcium sulfate, making it challenging to treat.

Implementing an efficient and creative treatment system is necessary to achieve high water recovery and water reuse of effluents. This requires several stages of treatment ranging from MBRs, clarifiers, UF, and other types of pre-treatment, followed by membrane-based solutions, and in case of full zero liquid discharge – a thermal evaporator and crystallizer downstream of the membrane solution.

Yet, the blowdown’s complex chemistry makes conventional membrane solutions suffer from pricey OPEX and technical difficulties, which prevents them from reaching high recovery and offering a sustainable solution. IDE’s efficient, holistic solution includes all the above with its proprietary, high recovery membrane-based technologies (MaxH2O) to provide high-quality water for increased reuse while overcoming water chemistry challenges.

Offered Free by: IDE Water Technologies