COLIN LEONARD
A key learning from my time in Delft was that many companies operate cooling towers on raw water and rely upon chemical treatment to manage cooling tower conditioning. The result is a high blow-down rate of 4-6 cycles of concentration. The result is a high use of chemicals which wind up in the effluent stream (blow-down water) and a tremendous waste of water. At a major university in New Orleans, we have provided a multi-technology water treatment system to pre-treat the cooling tower and boiler make up water resulting in projected water and energy savings as well as a reduced chemical load across the power plant. We will be watching the performance of this system very carefully for correlation between planned and actual water and energy savings. The next step for this type of design would be to recover a high percentage of water in the effluent streams of the multimedia, activated carbon and reverse osmosis systems.