A Comparison of Two Approaches to Achieve Acceptable Nanofiltration Process Feed Waters
Authors:
- George A. Brown, P.E., Hazen and Sawyer
- Geoff K. Hart, P.E., Hazen and Sawyer
- Rob B. Taylor, P.E., Hazen and Sawyer
Nanofiltration (NF) treatment processes are replacing lime softening capacity at numerous municipal water treatment plants (WTP) in Southeast Florida. Two such facilities are the Peele-Dixie WTP in Fort Lauderdale and the Town of Jupiter WTP. Both NF facilities are of similar capacity at 12 MGD for Peele-Dixie and 14.5 MGD for Jupiter and both facilities had existing surficial aquifer ground water supplies for their lime softening processes. It became apparent during testing in support of NF plant design that existing water quality was not adequate to supply an NF process, primarily because of biological activity in both processes. Two different solutions to similar problems were arrived at for these facilities.
The Peele-Dixie WTP was originally constructed in the 1920’s with a major expansion in the 1950’s. The wellfield was reaching the end of its useful life. The City of Fort Lauderdale’s utilities capital improvement program manager elected not to pursue additional pilot testing to resolve the water quality issue through pretreatment processes and ultimately elected to construct a new wellfield and transmission system to improve quality and delivery pressure. The Town of Jupiter’s water supply infrastructure, on the other hand, was constructed more recently, dating from the 1970’s (with some surficial wells still to be added to the present date) and their project team elected to conduct extensive NF and pretreatment pilot testing. The result was the design of a pretreatment facility to address quality and delivery pressure issues from the existing wellfield.
This paper describes the factors influencing the decisions, the design of and actual construction costs of these different approaches and the resulting water supply characteristics based on pilot testing or full-scale results.
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