Go against the flow

The main goal of the Chinese leading local brewery project was to build a new water treatment plant, in order to demonstrate ultra-high recovery, without compromising on permeate quality, by converting industrial brackish water to clean high-quality permeate for the beer production process.

An old RO system operating at 75% recovery needed to be replaced with a new RO solution, which would raise recovery to 90% in order to increase production. The brewery needed turnkey design, manufacturing, installation, commission & support of BWRO due to the demand for increased water production for the brewery.

The facility design needed to account for a relatively high concentration of carbonates and silica present in the water, which typically inhibit high-recovery operations. Hence, the plant was engineered in a 6:2 configuration utilizing Flow Reversal technology to balance salinity loading across the 1st and 2nd stage. The Flow Reversal is essential to achieving high-recovery operations, by inhibiting the scaling normally associated with carbonate and silica. The ROTEC facility was engineered with a treatment capacity of 60 m³/h, capable of producing high purity ingredient, <20 uS (Temperature range of 10-350C) upon customer demand.

The ROTEC RO system has been operating successfully since 2016, delivering increased recovery from 75% to 90%, the highest performance for a Low-Pressure RO system, and low energy consumption due to low feed pressure operation (10 bars). The system has proven resistance to SO4, CO3, SiO2 scaling and lower CIP frequency reported compared to conventional RO.

ROTEC boldly demonstrated a 20% increase in water recovery, setting the golden industry standard of boosting water and cost savings.