Water Softener

A water softener is a device or a substance that removes, or renders inactive and isolates, ions such as calcium, magnesium, iron or manganese in hard water. Water containing dissolved calcium and magnesium salts, or ferrous iron, in amounts greater than 120 mg/l is considered hard. Hard water forms scale, a deposit of carbonate salts, on the inner surfaces of boilers, cooking utensils, and pipes that carry hot water or steam. Iron oxidizes, reddening the water. Mineral salts precipitate the fatty acids from soap in the form of a scum or a gelatinous curd.

Because of the problems created by hard water, both for industry and for domestic water users, various types of water softeners have been developed. Water passed through a polystyrene ion exchange filter gives up calcium and magnesium ions for sodium ions from zeolites in the filter. The addition of lime to hard water precipitates mineral salts. Borax and sodium carbonate are also precipitating softeners. Trisodium phosphate, once a major ingredient of detergent washing powders, is an efficient water softener but is no longer used of the pollution problem it creates.

Water heater Problem

Water heater much use in the household as the equipment to overcome the cold whether condition, but many people don’t know what the problem come on water heater. Water heater use gas on our house work like cooker pot that always use to heat water. More often we use water heater than more thick of sediment will much more on the bottom of our heater pot, this sediment come from water that contain of mineral dissolved in the water.

This sediment build very slow process because the mineral contain on the water also slight. This sediment stick on the base of heater pot and stick very strong, sometime we clean this pot actually can’t remove all the sediment on the base heater pot. The problem on the water heater also come after interval of time. We can’t clean this sediment but flushing using hot water in regular time, more often we clean this sediment we have longer life time of our water heater.

The best way to treat this equipment in order not easily build a sediment in hot water is just use demineralization water, but if hot water sometime use for drink this water is not good for health because less of mineral contain. Demineralized water may more expensive that usual water, because it should pass through an exchange resin. So other better solution is use water that contain less of calcium because this mineral easily to build a sediment when heating.

WATER HEATER WATER HEATER PROBLEM WATER HEATER WATER HEATER PROBLEM

Water Control

Water become the first needed interest for our body, but people always destroy our water resources by their activity in daily either in Industry or in general activity, like to wash our cloths and clean other appliance that using unfriendly chemicals. Long time ago people may don't realize that their activity to wash something will destroy our water quality, but currently people become dependence of using washing chemicals that used together with water but destroy our nature. People just notice their needed especially if their activity generate money, people become lost his conscience, people don't care where his action will destroy environment or not. They just notice to their economic improvement.

Environment destruction also undertaken by industrialist, they do their activity by dump untreated sewage into the river. This happened almost in all development countries, usually in countries that develop their economic from industry activities like in China. Their rivers become great polluted as in China, and china also have city  the biggest polluted city in the world.

Dispose of waste water become the largest activity in Industry, if this disposal is not ruled in tightly, this world will damage in rapid way. Waste water treatment need high cost, but this should be done if we want to keep our intergovernmental last long live. Many river also become water supply source for our live, if this source damage by industries activity we will don't have water source anymore to supply our water needed.

Cooling Water Principle

The Principle of Cooling Water
Simple Heat Transfer.

A. Heat Exchanger are used for industrial process cooling.
Common Measurement of Heat: A BTU is the amount of heat required to raise the temperature of 1 lb of water 1 oF.

B. The Fundamental of Cooler
Why water use as cooling media?

Available in huge amount, easy to get and cheap

• Easy to operate
• Can bring heat in a huge capacity ( cp = 1 kcal/kg.oC)
• Expansion degree and contraction smaller compare with the temperature increase.
• No compromise

Fundamental of Cooling Water
Why water can not perfect as cooling media?
The weakness of water contain of impurities;

• Suspended Solid
• Dissolved Solid
• Dissolved gas

Water Source:

• Surface Water
• Ground Water
• Sea Water

Industrial Water Process

Water become the important component for industry, without water many industries can't work even can produce a product, so when planning erect an industry should consider of the water availability. Water source for industry can from many places, like from ground water, river water or surface water and can also from sea water that this mean raw water should be process first before use.

The kind of water treatments are also depend on the several matters, like water supply condition, and the kind of finish water to use. Water for boiler should be no contain of mineral inside because mineral contain will make problem on the boiler. Mineral on boiler water can accumulate on the boiler wall, more longer accumulate of boiler wall, the heat efficiency of boiler worse. This mineral on the water should be omitted, one of the process to omit this mineral use ion exchange process.

In the late of 1960's the first company that offer a specific iron dispersant for boiler water treatment use advantage plus deposit inhibitor to avoid of mineral scaling on the boiler. This chemicals usually can increase the temperature of boiler or can make the mineral become vaporize so the scaling mineral on boiler will be prevented. Inhibitor also can work as cathodic and anodic inhibitors to form a film on the steel and ferrous alloy. The inhibitor promote protective surface films of gamma iron oxide and reduce the diffusion of dissolve oxygen and corrosive anion to the base metal alloy. A combination of several advantage polymeric dispersant and oxidant resistant organic provide to control of calcium carbonate, calcium sulphate and calcium phosphate scale formation.

Water Pretreatment

Water pretreatment in industrial process usually do in all or part of the following steps:

1. Separation and Clarification systems
2. Aeration systems
3. Chemical feed and Desinfection systems
4. Ion Exchange systems
5. Reverse Osmosis (RO) system

Surface water, well water or reclaimed water can contain suspended solid, colloidal matter, organics, hardness, silica, iron, manganese and other contaminants. Because of those many possibility contaminant available on the water resource that you use as feed water, the next step on pretreatment of raw water depend on the contaminant content. It is important to choose the proper water pretreatment systems for your process.

If you use Reverse osmosis (RO) system on the downstream of your process, you should considered to use softener to remove hardness, this process will protect your RO system.

The problem that usually come on water process is declining of water quality, this can come because of the several problems below:

1. Increase pressure drops, especially in the last stage of the RO systems
2. Higher pressure required
3. Frequent cleanings to restore performance
4. Frequent and extensive downtime

Parameter On Waste Water Control

Waste treatment should be controlled by the limitation on Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) and for solid waste that dissolved on water should be measured by Total Suspended Solid (TSS) and Total Dissolved Solid (TDS).

Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD5) refers to the amount of oxygen that would be consumed if all the organics in one liter of water were oxidized by bacteria and protozoa or the amount of dissolved oxygen consumed in five days by biological processes breaking down organic matter.

Chemical oxygen Demand (COD) is used as a measure of oxygen requirement of a sample that is susceptible to oxidation by strong chemical oxidant or is a measure of the oxidizability of a substance, expressed as the equivalent amount in oxygen of an oxidizing reagent consumed by the substance under fixed laboratory conditions.

Total Suspended Solids (TSS) is a measure of the mass of fine inorganic particles suspended in the water that can be trapped by a filter.

TSS can include a wide variety of material, such as silt, decaying plant and animal matter, industrial wastes, and sewage. High concentrations of suspended solids can cause many problems for stream health and aquatic life.

Total Dissolved Solids (TDS) are the total amount of mobile charged ions, including minerals, salts or metals dissolved in a given volume of water.

AVG – Average is mean values of data collected within certain period of time for regulated parameter.

All of those (BOD, COD, TSS, TDS) are expressed in units of mg per unit volume of water (mg/L), also referred to as parts per million (ppm).

Water Conditioning Process

Water conditioning must be adapted to the particular use for which the water is designed, and problem should be referred to the experts in the field. The use of elevated pressure (17.2 MPa and higher for steam generation) requires the employment of extremely carefully purified boiler feedwater. Each industry has its special water conditioning requirement; e.g. laundries require zero hardness to prevent the precipitation of calcium and magnesium soap on clothes. Calcium, magnesium, and iron salts cause undesirable precipitates with dyes in the textile industries and with the dyes in paper manufacture.

In this industry an abundance of fairly soft water has long been available from surface supplies of the industrial Northeast. Cities such as New York and Boston obtained comparatively soft water from rural watersheds over igneous rocks. However, as the middle west and the west were developed, it became necessary to use the harder water prevailing in many areas, particularly those rich in limestone. This hard water needs to be softened for many uses. Furthermore, as the advantages of really soft water needs to be softened, more and more fairly soft waters are being completely softened for laundries, homes, textile mills, and certain chemical process. Thomas Clark of England, in 1841, patented the lime process for the removal of carbonate, or temporary; hardness, followed by Porter, who developed the use of soda ash to remove the noncarbonated, or permanent hardness of water. In 1906, Robert Gans, a German chemist, applied zeolite to commercial use for water softening purposes. Only since the 1980s has softening been extended to municipal supplies to any appreciable extent.

Method:
The purification and softening of water may be accomplished by different methods, depending on the prospective use. Softening in the term applied to process which remove or reduce the hardness of water. Purification, as distinguished from softening, usually refers to the removal of organic matter and microorganism from water. Clarification may be very important and may be combined with cold water softening by precipitation.

Old method for water purification that usually use in Industry are ion exchange process, by this process chemical contaminated will separate by absorption method. Positive ion will absorb by negative ion or anion and negative contaminate will absorb by positive ion or cation in ion exchange unit. By using this unit water will result nearly 98% of pure water. This pure water usually use for boiler feed, but still can’t use on pharmaceutical industry because still contain small ion contamination. For pharmaceutical Industry uses, pure water must be process by distillation unit and the unit must be made from glass material.

Odor Treatment

One of water treatment process in water supply is to omit the odor from the water, this odor come can be sourced from plant or animals spoil or can be categorized of organic matter, or can from chemical matter like Industrial Waste. Odor from organic matter in water contains can be omitted by such kind of adsorption or absorption substances, usually use active carbon that have ability to absorb gas from water or liquid contains.

Odor is a very complex matter to quantify and qualify. It varies from person to person what is considered smelly. A malodorous substance called mercaptane can be very pungent at extremely low concentrations of for example 5 ppb (parts per billion). Other bad odors such as H2S loose their smell at very high concentrations.

Odor control has long been a forgotten issue within the environmental concerns. Industrial production facilities have focused on reducing the quantity and improving the quality of their solid waste. Have cleaned up and remediate the factory's sites, have purified and recycled their waste water and commonly even reduced emissions to the ambient air. In many cases businesses have therefore complied with governmental and local laws and permits. For odor issues however the regulations are less clear. The only important factor has been the number of complaints the company receives from the locality.

With new residential areas built near to older industrial sites which used to be located on the outskirts of cities, citizens are increasingly being confronted with the malodors of manufacturing companies. Furthermore, whereas in the past the workers of the company were the only ones living in the neighborhood of the factory, nowadays with increasing mobility, the company's neighbor may not be his best friend. Moreover people have learned to stand up, confront and even sue local government and business if they believe health and comfort issues are at stake. It is therefore that odor control is becoming an important factor for every environmental officer and production manager.

Odor is one of the most difficult things to measure. As most samples of odorous air contain a cocktail of smelly substances with each different odor thresholds (limitation) it is nearly impossible to have an on-line analyzer or measuring system which can quantify and differentiate between these components. The standard method for measuring odors is the olfactory method. In a nutshell, samples of air are taken from the odorous source and are "measured" by a panel of people.

Ion Exchange

Ion exchange is part of water treament process for domestic water source or for industrial purpose. The description of this process are as follows:

Adsorption and ion exchange share so many common features in regard to application in batch and fixed-bed processes that they can be grouped together as sorption for a unified treatment. These processes involve the transfer and resulting equilibrium distribution of one or more solutes between a fluid phase and particles. The partitioning of a single solute between fluid and adsorbed phases or the selectivity of adsorbent towards multiple solutes makes it possible to separate solutes from a bulk fluid phase or from one another.

This section treats batch and fixed-bed operations and reviews process cycles and equipment. As the processes indicate, fixed-bed operation with the adsorbent in granule, bead, or pellet form is the predominant way of conducting sorption separations and purifications. Although the fixed-bed mode is highly useful, its analysis is complex. Therefore, fixed beds including chromatographic separations are given primary attention here with respect to both interpretation and prediction.

Adsorption involves, in general, the accumulation (or depletion) of solute molecules at an interface (including gas-liquid interfaces, as in foam fractionation, and liquid-liquid interfaces, as in detergency).

Here we consider only gas-solid and liquid-solid interfaces, with solute distributed selectively between the fluid and solid phases. The accumulation per unit surface area is small; thus, highly porous solids with very large internal area per unit volume are preferred. Adsorbent surfaces are often physically and/or chemically heterogeneous, and bonding energies may vary widely from one site to another. We seek to promote physical adsorption or physisorption, which involves van der Waals forces (as in vapor condensation), and retard chemical adsorption or chemisorption, which involves chemical bonding (and often dissociation, as in catalysis). The former is well suited for a regenerable process, while the latter generally destroys the capacity of the adsorbent. Adsorbents are natural or synthetic materials of amorphous or microcrystalline structure.

Those used on a large scale, in order of sales volume, are activated carbon, molecular sieves, silica gel, and activated alumina [Keller et al., gen. refs.]. Ion exchange usually occurs throughout a polymeric solid, the solid being of gel-type, which dissolves some fluid-phase solvent, or truly porous. In ion exchange, ions of positive charge in some cases (cations) and negative charge in others (anions) from the fluid (usually an aqueous solution) replace dissimilar ions of the same charge initially in the solid. The ion exchanger contains permanently bound functional groups of opposite charge-type (or, in special cases, notably weak-base exchangers act as if they do). Cation-exchange resins generally contain bound sulfonic acid groups; less commonly, these groups are carboxylic, phosphonic, phosphinic, and so on. Anionic resins involve quaternary ammonium groups (strongly basic) or other amino groups (weakly basic).

Most ion exchangers in large-scale use are based on synthetic resins-either preformed or then chemically reacted, as for polystyrene, or formed from active monomers (olefinic acids, amines, or phenols). Natural zeolites were the first ion exchangers, and both natural and synthetic zeolites are in use today.

Ion exchange may be thought of as a reversible reaction involving chemically equivalent quantities. A common example for cation exchange is the familiar water-softening reaction

Ca++ + 2NaRA <======> CaR2 + 2Na+

where R represents a stationary univalent anionic site in the polyelectrolyte network of the exchanger phase.

Water Cycle in Nature

In our environment, water has cycle on the state, this water state cycle is proposed to make evenly in all over the world and also become a balancer the pressure condition on this atmosphere.

The water in your glass may have fallen from the sky as rain just last week, but the water itself has been around pretty much as long as the earth has!

When the first fish crawled out of the ocean onto the land, your glass of water was part of that ocean. When the Brontosaurus walked through lakes feeding on plants, your glass of water was part of those lakes. When kings and princesses, knights and squires took a drink from their wells, your glass of water was part of those wells.

And you thought your parents were OLD

The earth has a limited amount of water. That water keeps going around and around and around and around and (well, you get the idea) in what we call the "Water Cycle".

This cycle is made up of a few main parts:

• evaporation (and transpiration)
• condensation
• precipitation
• collection

Evaporation:

Evaporation is when the sun heats up water in rivers or lakes or the ocean and turns it into vapor or steam. The water vapor or steam leaves the river, lake or ocean and goes into the air.

Well, sort of.... people perspire (sweat) and plants transpire. Transpiration is the process by which plants lose water out of their leaves. Transpiration gives evaporation a bit of a hand in getting the water vapor back up into the air.

Condensation:

Water vapor in the air gets cold and changes back into liquid, forming clouds. This is called condensation.

You can see the same sort of thing at home... pour a glass of cold water on a hot day and watch what happens. Water forms on the outside of the glass. That water didn't somehow leak through the glass! It actually came from the air. Water vapor in the warm air, turns back into liquid when it touches the cold glass.

Precipitation:

Precipitation occurs when so much water has condensed that the air cannot hold it anymore. The clouds get heavy and water falls back to the earth in the form of rain, hail, sleet or snow.

Collection:

When water falls back to earth as precipitation, it may fall back in the oceans, lakes or rivers or it may end up on land. When it ends up on land, it will either soak into the earth and become part of the “ground water” that plants and animals use to drink or it may run over the soil and collect in the oceans, lakes or rivers where the cycle starts. Water is the most part on this earth.