3. Membrane Water Treatment – Hands-on Training

Maija Vidqvist, Karri Aunola, Ville Rantanen, Minna Pihlajakuja, Lasse Sannikka

Minimum 5, maximum 15 delegates
Regular € 290/310  Students € 200/220

Mines are challenged to improve the water treatment on mine sites and to decrease water consumption by increasing the water recirculation. Based on the experiences from process and drinking water industry, the recirculation is possible because of the competitive technology, reverse osmosis (RO). It is widely used almost with all the industries, mines being the last frontier with only a couple of real full-scale installations around the world.
The target audience is water the treatment designers, the engineers, the suppliers, the authorities and any person interested on the membrane technologies and their design as well as operation and usage in the mine water treatment.

Workshop program

Part A. Theory

1. Reverse osmosis, introduction
2. Membranes and pressure vessels, technical data

  • design calculations with the design programs
  • alt rejection, concentration polarization, fouling, scaling
  • designing a membrane unit, required instrumentation to control the permeate flow and recovery, necessary measurements, system design with the tanks and other auxiliaries incl. cleaning

3. Pre-treatment challenges and strategies

  • solids removal, filtration alternatives
  • antiscalant chemistry
  • problems related to scaling (e.g. gypsum and calciumcarbonate)
  • biological fouling, disinfection alternatives

Part B. Hands-on training

4. Hands-on training with 500 L/h pilot-scale ultrafiltration and reverse osmosis system in groups of 4–5 people

  • modelling the pilot unit
  • using log-book and process follow-up (temperature, pressure, conductivity and flow)
  • conducting analysis (conductivity, SDI and pH)
  • preparing samples for the microbial contamination, for the metals and for the suspended solids

Part C. Group reports and discussion

After the course, the participants are familiar with the reverse osmosis technology, with its design features, with the pre-treatment options and with the operation and the maintenance procedures
The slides and other material shown will be handed to the participants and additionally design programme loading instructions are given.