The Top 8 Process Water Treatment Technologies

This is generally employed during the removal process of organic compounds and/or extracting free chlorine from water, thereby making the water suitable for discharge or use in manufacturing processes. However, heavy metals, such as lead, can only be removed with a very specific kind of activated carbon water treatment, which is typically used only in residential point-of-use filters.

This can be used to treat water in boilers operating at less than 700 psi. It works similar to water softening, in that it utilizes ion exchange to remove unwanted ions from a water supply. However, rather than removing calcium and magnesium ions, dealkalization removes carbonate ions, exchanging them for chloride ions.

In-house deionizers automatically regenerate on a pre-set frequency, consuming acid and caustic, and then discharging a waste stream containing high concentrations of the acid and caustic. However, these systems are expensive to purchase and can be very maintenance-intensive. The other option for this process is service deionization, also referred to as "portable exchange deionization", which uses tanks containing deionization resin that is plumbed right into your process water system with flexible connectors and exchanged upon exhaustion by regenerated tanks.

This is a physical process that separates mixtures containing at least one liquid. This treatment separates water from virtually all dissolved and suspended contaminants, as well as using high temperatures to kill viruses, bacteria, and spores.

This is a physical filtration process that removes suspended solids from water by utilizing a small pore-size filtering medium, typically a membrane. Unlike reverse osmosis and nanofiltration, microfiltration utilizes only physical filtration to remove particles in the 0.1 to 10 micron range, including bacteria. Unlike nanofiltration and RO, microfiltration does not remove dissolved contaminants.

This refers to a pressure filter vessel, which utilizes three or more different media, as opposed to a "sand filter" that typically uses one grade of sand alone as the filtration media. In a multi-media filter, during the "settling" cycle, the finest or smallest media particles remain on top of the media bed while the larger, and heavier particles, stratify proportional to their mass lower in the filter. This allows the multi-media filter to hold a much larger mass of “dirt” before backwashing.

Reverse osmosis systems utilize man-induced pressure on the "dirty side" (high mineral content side) to overcome the natural osmotic pressure trying to flow the other way. This includes the added pressure to speed the process, in order to force water across the semi-permeable membrane to the "clean side". In the RO process, 98% or more of the dissolved minerals are left behind on the "dirty side".

This process utilizes thin cylindrical bulbs capable of generating narrow band wavelength UV light placed in close proximity to high-purity glass tubes through which the water flows. The unit must be sized to provide adequate dosage for the specified flowrate. The water to be treated must be sufficiently free of sediment, iron, manganese, and any colorant that could affect transmission of the 254 nm UV light.