Everyone Needs Clean Water

Water treatment is important to everyone. Whether you are responsible for the design and operation of an industrial complex that discharges to a surface water stream, or if you are in charge of a municipal water supply plant and want to help ensure your customers get what they expect, clean water is an asset we can’t live without.

While we are capable of municipal waste water plant designs, this is not where we choose to apply our skills. Our background as plant operations chemical engineers leads us to focus on other important types of water – Process Water and Industrial Wastewater.

Just as you recognize that the quality of your incoming chemicals can affect your product’s quality, the trace contaminants in your process water can affect your process and your products.  Knowing what you are feeding into the process can help control what you are getting out. Additionally, proper process water conditioning can also help maintain operations efficiency by preventing unwanted fouling or corrosion issues leading to process equipment damage or unnecessary downtime for cleaning.

Most industrial wastewater treatment facilities are not seen as being a profitable part of the overall operation. Collecting, treating, and discharging is simply something that has to be done to keep a process plant in operation and in compliance with the regulations. So….how are you handling your residues? Are you losing product unnecessarily due to process inefficiencies? Is your back-end wastewater plant bottle-necking your main production line and limiting your productivity? Even worse, are you experiencing unwanted excursions in your wastewater treatment systems leading to noncompliance with environmental regulations? PROCESS can help minimize your wastewater treatment system problems and in turn help maximize your plant’s efficiency and profits.

Our Services

PROCESS is very familiar with the design and operation of industrial process wastewater systems. This is because most of our engineers have a significant production plant operations background and understand the importance of a smooth and continuous back end water treatment operation. Many variables and combinations of variables can have a significant negative impact on wastewater treatment operations – weather conditions, upstream process unit upsets, changes in upstream process unit operating conditions, changes in raw materials or chemical treatment suppliers, unexpected trace components entering the system (from corrosion, spills, etc.)….and many more. PROCESS provides the following services to help you in any phase of your process water and wastewater operations:

  • Wastewater treatment system alternatives evaluation study
  • Process Water or Wastewater treatment system design
  • Assessment of process inputs/feeds
  • Assessment/inventory of recycle/reuse and substitution opportunities
  • Evaluation of process modifications to enhance performance
  • Chemical addition system design
  • Regulatory assessment to summarize current and future requirements
  • Wastewater permit preparation support
  • Preparation of laboratory/bench test protocols
  • Stormwater permit preparation support
  • Wastewater generation planning for future facilities
  • Groundwater treatment system design.

Our Experience

When designing a wastewater treatment system it is important to understand the range of operating conditions the system must be designed to handle. This includes designing in flexibility to allow for easy startup, having proper surge capacity at key locations in the system, designing correct subsystems for monitoring/control, and having proper redundancy of equipment where necessary. All of these things must be carefully considered to make sure that your effluent will fall within acceptable limits under a reasonably wide range of conditions. PROCESS has the experience to design new process water and wastewater treatment systems or to suggest ways to optimize existing systems. Having a good understanding of plant operations as a whole, and the upstream processes, is an important element in being able to design a robust and reliable wastewater system.