Rapid Valley Sanitary District-A Stable, Long-term, and Resilient Solution for Clean Water and Consistent Volume
In 2017, the Rapid Valley Sanitary District was not able to reach its goal to deliver three million gallons per day (3 MGD) of drinking water to the community. The root cause was the unreliable and insufficient capacity from the existing polymeric microfiltration systems.
Challenges for Rapid Valley:
- Not meeting capacity demands: Near-freezing temperatures, varied quality of feed water, combined with excessive need for maintenance and cleaning of polymeric microfiltration membrane (MF) systems significantly challenged the Rapid Valley community with supplying sufficient potable water to meet current and future demands
- Significant operator intervention needed to avoid system shutdown: Existing polymeric membranes regularly experienced irreversible fouling and fiber breakage compromising the normal runtime and required regular maintenance to address these on-going issues
- Lost productivity and increase operating expenses: the manpower and chemical costs to maintain the aging system had a significant impact on operating costs
Nanostone CM-151 ceramic ultrafiltration membrane has successfully helped this plant to increase the overall factory water recovery rate to 98% and reach to a 70% reduction in chemical cost.
A Stable, Long-term, and Resilient Solution for Clean Water and Consistent Volume
Implementation of two Nanostone CM-151 Ceramic Ultrafiltration Membrane Systems enabled Rapid Valley to:
- Restore the required capacity to 3 MGD using only two systems out of three, providing a reliable supply of high-quality drinking water to the community even during near-freezing temperatures, or with the massive fluctuation of feed water quality, and increased the water recovery rate of the overall plant from 95% to over 98%
- Operate trouble-free and consistently pass daily integrity testing, meeting rigorous quality standards for drinking water
- Decrease chemical consumption by 70% by significantly extending the time between chemical cleanings
- Drastically reduce process steps with high manpower demands, with fewer shutdowns to pin broken fibers
Since investing in Nanostone’s CM-151™ ceramic UF system, the Rapid Valley operators have a stable, long-term solution for clean water and consistent volume. When the third rack is changed out, the overall capacity will be expanded to 5 MGD with the same footprint, enabling the community to have a resilient water system for current and future capacity needs.