Machine Learning and Desalination

Machine Learning (ML) disrupts engineering thinking as it transforms its purpose from amassing and memorizing unclassified intangible knowledge to producing tangible ML models (along with algorithms and data). They may be stored, shared, collected, and updated. ML models are modern bitcoins and a new rapidly expanding market.
Read more..

Instrumentation & Control Systems Design Guide

This guide is introductory, its purpose is to describe the scope of practical problems addressed by Crenger. It is a companion to the PlantDesigner User Guide.
Read more..

Advanced Desalination Plant Design

Described are main principles of future desalination plants design and operation.
Read more..

Desalination: Predicting Energy Costs

The article explains why predicting energy costs is a cornerstone question separating winners from losers. The quest for its answer leads us to digital twins and generative design applications.
Read more..

Desalination Lessons Not To Learn

The articles shows how the current challenges of megaprojects execution experienced by desalination companies may be easily overcame with digital technologies
Read more..

Cyclic Fatigue in Desalination Plants

Discussed is the cyclic fatigue effect on the desalination plant useful life and CAPEX.
Read more..

How Noisy is Your Desalination Plant?

In assessing the environmental impact of the future desalination plant we tend to focus on the impact of brine discharge on marine life. This problem often distracts us from the second point of our concern - noise pollution.
Read more..

Engineering Toolbox for Desalination Mega-Projects

To build engineering calculators, the engineer should leave the "comfort zone" of water treatment and dive into the pool of disciplines ranging from hydraulics to electrical circuits. As this task is beyond the core desalination business, engineering toolbox is still a dream come true.
Read more..

Requirements for Reverse Osmosis Membranes Management Framework

Complexity of operation and maintenance (O&M) of modern desalination plants cannot be reliably handled any more by long accumulated human experience, digital technologies shall be used. This article is an introduction into O&M automation principles.
Read more..

Overview of Design, Construction, and Operation of SWRO plants

All these SWRO desalination projects (20,000 - 440,000 m3/day) are of multiple train design; the size of each train being defined by the capacity of the SWRO process driver – the high pressure feed pump. So the S1800 project is for seawater desalination and built around the 1800 m3/h pump.
Read more..

FEED Your Desalination Project!

FEED stands for Front End Engineering &smp; Design. It is a critical stage of any project, absorbing the engineering services provider know-how. It contains full information on the equipment ordering and defines the exact scope of the next stage - detail mechanical, electrical, instrumentation and control design. FEED substantiates the plant guaranteed functionality and reliability, the project timetable and the budget and substantially decreases the project risks and contingencies.
Read more..

Pump Intake Design and Orthodoxy of Engineering Thinking

Intake is a first component of seawater desalination plant; it defines the plant production and scenarios for future extension. It serves 3 tasks: inlet piping pigging, coarse water filtration, and, of course, pumping. First 2 tasks require roughly 50% of the intake cross section.
Read more..

Can Turbocharger Replace Water Intake?

Affordable desalination is a result of many incremental innovations and micro-disruptions of conventional ways of doing things. This article is about how immaculate design may be toppled by another, like coal power stations by solar panels and wind turbines.
Read more..

PumpStudio: Building Plant Digital Twin

PumpStudio is a collection of applications needed to build the plant digital twin - to engineer the desalination process, select and rate the equipment and model the plant actual performance at different conditions.
Read more..

Open Standards And Customer Satisfaction

To accelerate the water industry transformation and make it more transparent, open standards shall be created. To initiate this work, water industry does not need to invent a wheel - enough to learn the experience of modern oil and gas industry.
Read more..

Desalination Equipment Costs Online

The database containing equipment purchase prices from different manufacturers is equally important for the designer and the manufacturer. The first will have a solid basis for the innovative technology commercialization, the scale-up costs estimation, and the business extension, while the latter - an entry-level price target not to miss.
Read more..

Resales of Desalination Equipment

Recently I visited the 300 MLD desalination plant. What attracted my attention was a scrapyard adjacent to the plant. In rows were skids, membrane vessels, tanks and piping pieces. The plant manager had no idea how to turn these wastes into profit. Internet is of no avail - the desalination industry with annual sales of over USD 26 billion (by 2025) has no websites for the used equipment (UE) and parts resales.
Read more..

How To Buy Desalination Plant?

Googling this question does not give any results, neither visiting the sites of major engineering services providers and consultants. Obviously it is an experience nobody is willing to share. Even worse, lately the last two contractors removed from their websites the client's questionnaires.
Read more..

How To Prepare SWRO Desalination Plant Bid?

It would not be exaggeration to say that success of the project bidding substantially depends upon how complete the input data are. Below is a roadmap to these data collection with some brief explanation of each milestone contents and/or necessity.
Read more..

How To Design SWRO Like Professional?

Michelangelo is quoted as saying "Trifles make perfection, and perfection is no trifle". Here we'll talk about engineering trifles that pave the road to the plant perfect design.
Read more..

Three Steps of Desalination Megaplant Design

The article describes principles and user interfaces forming a core of the desalination plant design automation.
Read more..

SWRO Plant Operation Modes

SWRO plant production capacity and operation modes are 2 inseparable halves. The clients and the designers shall be in full agreement about them as they may define "a family car" or "a racer" differing in price by more than 100%! For example, the seawater intake filtering system withstanding the jellyfish inrush lasting just several days a year is 3 times more expensive than the ordinary traveling band screen.
Read more..

How To Predict SWRO Plant Reliability?

There is a widespread confusion between the desalination plant availability and reliability terms. The latter relates to the procured equipment failure rate and is the negotiation point of the project package whereas the first is not as it depends on the repair capabilities of the plant personnel and the adopted preventive maintenance plan (PMP). It necessarily includes such time-consuming procedures as CIP cleaning, the membranes reshuffling and replacement and the seawater intake pipe pigging.
Quantitatively availability is always less than reliability. Depending on the plant design the latter varies within 97.5 – 99.5%. Availability below 95% is not rare.
Read more..

Plant Availability Analysis Demystified

The tender request for the desalination plant availability analysis (PAA) is becoming a commonplace. Generally PAA shall demonstrate that the offered plant is reliable enough and convince the client that the selected technical solutions are optimized to the availability criteria. Most water companies do not have reliability expert on staff. So the only chance not to be disqualified because of PAA is to outsource it. By the author experience, outsourcing of PAA is not always feasible as the final scholarly report may add some US$ 30,000 to the offer preparation expenses and at least 3-week delay to the offer submission date.
Read more..

How To Select The Right Pump?

Times are gone when the pump selection was boiled down to the definition of the head, flow rate and material of construction. Nowadays high-capacity high-head pumps for desalination applications are a sophisticated piece of equipment always custom-tailored to the client requests. These pumps are a critical path component of the project schedule and the major contributor to the overall energy consumption of the plant.
Read more..

Water Hammer Prevention in SWRO High Pressure Pumps

This engineering report illustrates the level of problems ususally handled by desalination experts in industry. The report describes the real situation encountered in the 100 MLD SWRO desalination project (India, 2013).
Read more..

DWEER Valve Induced Water Hammer Prediction

This use case is interesting as it describes the DWEER-type valve inherent performance in ideal test environment.
Read more..

How To Get The Best Out Of Side-ported RO Vessels?

Hydraulic design of side-ported RO vessel arrangement is where many manufacturers stumbles over. Generally any RO vessels arrangement has two primary elements: the vessel row and the pipe manifolds, From hydraulics point of view the side-ported vessels and pipe manifolds may be connected in a number of ways
Read more..

Valve Controlled Startup of Desalination Plant

It is a common wisdom that regardless of the desalination plant size the goodness of its design depends on how we solve 2 problems – seawater pretreatment and start-up sequence. The first point is well researched – googling produces thousands of links. However, the second one somehow has escaped the desalination community attention.
Read more..

Elegant Startup & Shutdown of Desalination MegaPlant

Future desalination mega-plants shall be not only energy-efficient but also maneuverable - may be easily started up or shut down. It is important when a desalination mega-plant is driven by solar energy or is a single source of potable water in an ecosystem with diurnal variations of water consumption. Today plant brutal start-up is a norm. Can we make it better? Definitely yes.
Read more..

How To Start-up Desalination Plant?

This paper may serve as a template in preparing the desalination plant RFP - request for proposal. It touches the main points to be explained by the project bidder in her/his technical offer regarding start-up and shut-down sequences.
Read more..