Factory Reference Designs — Six Water Treatment Applications

They are planning references, not delivered projects. No client name, site, contract quantity or commissioning result is shown, because those details belong to the buyer and are not published. Each example states an assumed source water, the contaminants that typically appear, a treatment train that addresses them, a flow range for early sizing and an installation format.

The purpose is to shorten the first conversation. A buyer can point to a scenario that resembles the project, compare the assumed water quality with the actual analysis, and see which process steps are likely to remain. The design still has to be confirmed by a water analysis and a site survey.

All six scenarios use the same structure, so they can be compared without decoding different formats. The ranges are deliberately broad; a single number would imply a precision that the assumptions do not support.

A hotel typically draws from a municipal supply or a borehole and uses water for guest drinking, kitchens, laundry, pools and cooling. Hardness and chlorine are the usual concerns; iron and manganese appear where borehole water is used. A common reference train is multimedia filtration, activated carbon, softening, RO for drinking and kitchen points, and UV at the outlet. Laundry and cooling may need separate softening rather than RO.

A restaurant or coffee shop has a smaller and more peaky demand. The main risks are chlorine taste, hardness scale in coffee machines and steamers, and bacteria in stored water. A compact train of carbon, softening, RO and UV, with a small treated-water tank, is often enough. Flow range is typically 0.5–3 m³/h, and the equipment usually sits in a back-of-house plant room or a compact skid.

Both scenarios often share a building but not a water quality target. Drinking water needs a lower TDS and disinfection; laundry and cooling need softened water rather than fully demineralised water. Combining them into one RO train can oversize the drinking-water plant and send high-quality water to tasks that do not need it.

A factory may need process water rather than drinking water. The target might be low hardness for boiler make-up, low conductivity for rinsing, or removal of iron for a production line. A reference train starts with the process requirement, then adds pretreatment, RO or softening, and polishing as needed. Flow range is wide, typically 5–50 m³/h, and the plant is usually in a dedicated plant room.

A remote community, camp or construction site usually has a borehole, river or trucked water, no reliable municipal supply and limited maintenance. Turbidity, iron, manganese, hardness, TDS and bacteria can appear together. A containerized train with multimedia, carbon, softener, RO, UV or chlorine and a treated-water tank is the usual reference; flow is typically 1–20 m³/h. It is built and tested as one unit, then connected on site.

The two scenarios differ mainly in infrastructure. A factory usually has power, a plant room and maintenance staff; a remote site may have none of the three. That is why the remote reference is containerized and includes disinfection and storage, while the factory reference can be a skid inside an existing building.

Send the water analysis, the required flow at peak and daily, the intended use, the site conditions and the destination. Add the local power standard, the language for labels and manuals, and any certification or discharge requirement. With those inputs, a reference design can be converted into a project-specific process flow diagram and equipment list.

If a full laboratory analysis is not available, start with the parameters that most often change the train: hardness, iron, manganese, turbidity, TDS and bacteria. A partial analysis narrows the options; it does not replace the full report before the design is frozen.