Industry uses water every day for heating, cooling, cleaning, a product component, and more. This includes manufacturing, commercial, institutional, healthcare, food & beverage, hospitality, power generation, and other industrial-sized users. The unique properties of water along with its plentiful supply in many areas make it both an invaluable and irreplaceable resource. While oil lubricates the wheels of industry, water is its lifeblood.
Industrial Water Systems
Common industrial water systems include:
- Boilers: Specialized mechanical devices designed to heat water to produce steam or hot water for a variety of applications (e.g., space heating, process heating, driving turbines).
- Cooling Towers: Recirculating, evaporative water systems used to cool process (e.g., building air conditioning, industrial processes).
- Closed Loops: Continuously recirculating loops where heat is added in one part of a system and then removed in another part without direct air contact or evaporation (e.g., chilled loops, hot loops).
- Process Water: Can be used as a product ingredient, cleaning medium, or within facility operations.
- Wastewater: Treatment systems to remove undesirable, regulated contaminants before discharging to the environment.
Water’s Challenges
As essential as water is to industry, it comes with many challenges, including scarcity, corrosion, scale deposits, health risks, efficient use, and environmental impact. Piping, equipment, safety, energy, and water all have a cost these challenges can greatly influence.
- Scarcity: Reduced availability of water of sufficient quality.
- Corrosion: Damages metals, reduces equipment lifespan, causes leaks, and increases safety risks.
- Scale Deposits: Reduces heat transfer efficiency (which increases energy costs), plugs up piping and equipment, and may lead to under-deposit corrosion.
- Microbiological Growth: Can cause severe corrosion and insulating biofilms, plus negatively influence health risks.
- Health Risks: Waterborne pathogens (e.g., Legionella) may pose a risk to surrounding populations.
- Efficient Use: Water has value due to its initial cost plus any pretreatment expenses, heating/cooling energy, and chemicals added.
- Environmental Impact: Both extracting water and adding water back to the environment has an impact that must be properly managed.
Industrial Water Treatment
These challenges must be addressed to protect the water systems outlined above and meet the end users’ goals and responsibilities. Industrial water treatment helps meet these responsibilities head-on with chemistry, equipment, and service to reduce total costs of operation and minimize impacts upon both public health and the environment.
- Chemistry: An understanding of both the chemistry of water plus the chemicals that may be added to manage the challenges water poses.
- Equipment: Properly applied hardware to treat and control water qualities (e.g., softeners, reverse osmosis, feed & control).
- Service: Onsite and remote support by Industrial Water Treatment Professionals and their supporting team (e.g., engineers, experts, scientists, lab personnel).
Sustainability
Industrial water treatment was FOUNDED as a more sustainable alternative to using water only once, accepting energy-robbing scale as a cost of doing business, tolerating equipment-destroying corrosion, and dumping hazardous wastewater to the environment. Through advances in chemistry and equipment with the support of expert service, industrial water treatment minimizes the impact upon the environment by maximizing water and energy efficiencies, minimizing scale and corrosion, and optimizing wastewater treatment.
Conclusion
The modern world that we live in today simply could not exist as we know it without industrial water treatment. From data centers and microchip manufacturing to food production and comfort air conditioning, water plays a vital, irreplaceable role.
Chem-Aqua has a long, successful history of providing world-class industrial water treatment through our chemistry expertise, equipment capabilities, and service offerings. Contact Chem-Aqua today for help with your needs.