A choice of custom-designed reverse-osmosis (RO) desalination pretreatment systems is being launched by ITT Corporation in the USA this week at the American Water Works Association’s conference in Washington, DC, prior to a global launch at the International Desalination Association World Congress in Perth, Australia, in September.
The ITT Leopold Desalination Pretreatment Solutions (DPS) product line offers various filtration types to cope with particular RO membrane plant requirements. These include options include Leopold FilterWorx™ gravity media filters, Leopold Clari-DAF® (dissolved air flotation) systems, a combination of the Clari-DAF System and FilterWorx System, or two-stage FilterWorx Filters.
The Clari-DAF system excels at removing algae, color, low-density solids, free oil, and organics, while the FilterWorx media filter will continuously provide an effluent silt density index (SDI) count of <4 to the RO membranes. With proper coagulation chemistry, the FilterWorx system will remove clays, colloidal silica, precipitated metal hydroxides, humic and fulvic acids, and some level of algae and bacteria. In addition, the Flat Bottom Flume® filter design offers considerable cost savings in construction. “We are pleased to bring this offering to the desalination segment of our industry,” commented Rob Laird, general manager of Leopold. “We’ve acquired 87 years of filtration experience in addition to technological expertise gained from our desalination pretreatment plants in operation in the Middle East and Australia since 1985. That experience and knowledge is the keystone that makes our DPS the optimum choice to keep desalination RO membrane plants operating at top efficiency.”