New Water Treatment Techology

In WaterOnline, one of the newsletters I receive, there was a synopsis of an article published in Nature Nanotechnology on March 21, 2010 entitled "Direct seawater desalination by ion concentration polarization" by Sung Jae Kim, Sung Hee Ko, Kwan Hyoung Kang & Jongyoon Han.

In the Water Online Article, it describes "A new approach to desalination being developed by researchers at MIT and in Korea could lead to small, portable desalination units that could be powered by solar cells or batteries and could deliver enough fresh water to supply the needs of a family or small village. As an added bonus, the system would also remove many contaminants, viruses and bacteria at the same time."

In the actual abstract of article in Nature Nantechnology, it states "A shortage of fresh water is one of the acute challenges facing the world today. An energy-efficient approach to converting sea water into fresh water could be of substantial benefit, but current desalination methods require high power consumption and operating costs or large-scale infrastructures, which make them difficult to implement in resource-limited settings or in disaster scenarios... Rather than competing with larger desalination plants, the method could be used to make small- or medium-scale systems, with the possibility of battery-powered operation."

In the "Next Big Future Blog", there are some excellent drawings extracted from the journal depicting how the process works.

Custom Manual Water Softeners Shipped

Last week, we shipped two custom water softeners. The customer was using the softeners to treat the water feeding plant safety showers. Res-Kem has the flexibility to take our standard industrial water softener designs and modify them to meet a specific customer's requirements for virtually the same cost as our standard systems.

For example:
The plant has strict explosion-proof requirements. Even with the multitude of standard designs Res-Kem has using Fleck, Autotrol, Aquamatic, and Bray valves and Aquamatic electro-mechanical or Allen Bradley controls, we collectively determined the cost to accomplish an automatic, explosion-proof design was too great for the application.

So, each system is a single tank unit with manual regeneration. The face piping was Schedule 80 PVC. The valves were true union ball valves. Polyethylene lined composite fiberglass tanks with laminate glass exterior, 150 psi ASME code. Also, the customer requested a pressure relief valve for over pressure protection.

Triple Greensand Plus Filter for Iron and Manganese Removal

A triple Greensand Plus filter for iron and manganese removal was assembled and shipped today. This skid-mounted system will be installed to treat the water for a small community water system in the Poconos operated by a large private water utility company.


The system operates in a parallel arrangement with three skid mounted, Greensand Plus filters with optional interconnecting piping and isolation valves. As specified, Bray butterfly valves with electric actuators are used. To match standard practice at the utility, a Modicon Premium PLC with Wonderware Windows CE operator interface panel will be used. Each tank is epoxy lined carbon steel with an epoxy exterior, 150 psi ASME code. Face piping consists of Schedule 40 black pipe and fittings. Regeneration initiated by either high differential pressure or timeclock.


As stated in a previous post, Greensand Plus iron and manganese removal media from Inversand replaces the discontinued Greensand filter media.

Online Catalog for Water Treatment Equipment

Now, when you visit www.reskem.com, you can quickly compare features of over 380 standard pieces of Res-Kem's water treatment equipment, evaluate our system options, download product brochures and request a quote using our online catalog. Res-Kem added this online catalog to our website to maintain our 1# rating for responsiveness.

Currently, the catalog is only accessible through http://catalog.reskem.com. Over the next few weeks we will be making changes to most every page to fully integrate the catalog into our site. You will be able to view the entire catalog structure through the sitemap.

Also, list pricing and online purchasing will be available for water system replacement parts by the end of June 2010.

Stainless Steel Condensate Polisher with Bray Valves

Res-Kem just completed another condensate polisher manufactured in stainless steel. This system uses our standard design with optional butterfly valves.


The vessel is manufactured from 304L stainless steel with 100 psi ASME code construction. Pipe assemblies are welded Schedule 10 304L stainless steel piping. This single unit condensate polisher has an added feature of automatic bypass. The customer required our optional Bray butterfly valve design.

The actuators are air open/spring return so the valves can work with the GE Aquamatic 962 series stager controller.

Regeneration is initiated by either:

• Gallon throughput


• High differential pressure


• Timeclock

Additional Information:
Condensate Polisher Product Bulletin
The white paper, "Condensate Polisher Savings of 23% Realized Through Value Engineering", shows how a value engineering team yielded the best condensate polishing system for the money.

Blogger Transition from FTP-Step #7

While everything looked fine at first, it turns out there was one more big problem we had in our transition from our own hosted blog using FTP with Blogger to a Blogger hosted blog. The numerous pictures we had in our old posts were not showing up in our Blogger hosted version. It turned out a step 7 required to make the final transition.

After searching Blogger Help and hunting around we found this paragraph at the bottom of the page:

"This situation may arise if you originally published your blog via FTP and then switched to using custom domain publishing. Images originally posted to your server do not get transferred over to Blogger when you do this, so you may want to move them all to a server such as images.yourdomain.com and use that as your missing files host."

Blogger did not make this easy because I needed to make a new server, so I had to contact LinuxForce to help us one more time.

I think finally I am out of the woods on this transition! Now I can get back to my routine blogs on water treatment systems, news, innovation and technology.