Design challenges of the Jamnagar SWRO plant – from piloting to commissioning

摘要

Nowadays, ultrafiltration is commonly considered as an ideal stand-alone pretreatment technology to treat seawater and to produce a constant quality treated water to a reverse osmosis step for desalination purposes. End of 2013, IDE Technologies has been awarded a contract for a new seawater desalination plant located in Jamnagar, Gujarat state, India's arid north-western region, to supply the refinery complex with up to 168,000 m(3)/d (44.4 million gallons per day) of process water from seawater of the Gulf of Kutch. In 2014, inge GmbH has been awarded a contract to supply its ultrafiltration membrane technology as pretreatment to the reverse osmosis. The design of the plant had to meet particularly difficult requirements, both for pretreatment and post-treatment. The pretreatment stage is one of the key factors in the success of reverse osmosis desalination. It must remove the main impurities from the seawater and thus ensure a reliable operation of the reverse osmosis. This is even more important when seawater contains high concentrations of organic matter and is subject to frequent algal blooms. In order to have a smooth operation of the plant over the long-term, different steps were to be considered from pilot testing to start-up and commissioning. This paper deals with the design implications and then the ways to replicate this during a pilot phase. Piloting results presented confirm that the ultrafiltration modules could meet the very ambitious targets in terms of process stability, filtrate quality and yield, especially during the monsoon period and finally impact the process design. The paper also presents commissioning challenges.