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is proudly sponsored by the rising tide Mastermind when was the last time you
read a book and you actually applied it to your day-to-day well that’s one of
the things that we do within the rising tide Mastermind no it is not a book club but we do use books to enhance our core
knowledge on how we approach our day-to-day lives how we approach the
goals that we have in business and then we read those books and we figure out
how we help each other with the techniques that we learn within that book to help the day today we get above
the day-to-day so we can affect the day-to-day if this is something that
sounds interesting to you I would love it if you went to scalingup h2o.com
forward slash Mastermind to find out more and to see if this group is right
for you welcome to the scaling up H2O podcast
the podcast where we scale up on our knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems I’m your host Trace Blackmore
and Nation we made it to June June 2023
seems like just yesterday we were talking about welcoming in
2023 and now we’re halfway through it and I don’t know each and every year it
seems to go by quicker and quicker and if that’s not a lesson to take advantage of each and every day and make sure that
everything that you do has purpose everything that you’re doing is growing
you to become a better you and above all else making sure that you are helping
somebody else become better too now maybe that is training them to become a
better industrial water Trader or May maybe that is just being kind
in your words and think about that that’s all it takes is for us to be kind
in our words and that changes everybody else’s day and I’m sure if you think
about that happening to you and how somebody’s kind words impacted you
imagine if you could get that each and every day well unfortunately we can’t
control getting that but we can most certainly control giving that so it’s my
challenge to you that you are using kind words in each and every interaction that
you have I promise it will create a ripple effect that will help not only us
but everybody we interact with nation what are some things that we can
celebrate in June so I looked at the calendar and I know we are in 90 plus
countries around the globe well I’m looking at my United States calendar so
for everybody in the scaling up nation that is outside of the United States you can play along with some of the things
that we are doing here in June so on June 5th it is World environment day and
this is a day meant to increase our awareness around
environmental issues across the globe and how can we be a part of that change
well Nation that’s got water written all over it so I urge you to see what you
can do on June 5th to help some of the environmental issues that we have around
our industry on June 14th the United States celebrates Flag Day so be sure to
raise your flag and you can learn about the flag code we’re actually going to
put the U.S flag code on our website so if you ever wondered what the proper way
is to display your flag Wonder no more we’re going to have all of that for you
so you can fly your flag properly next
June 18th which of course is Father’s Day a nation I am so excited for this
one because it is my first Father’s Day Ever One of the items that I got to
celebrate this year is we adopted our son so June 18th is my first Father’s
Day and I cannot wait on June 19th we call this Juneteenth and this was to
celebrate on 1865 Union general Gordon Granger read the Emancipation
Proclamation allowed in Galveston Texas and this effectively liberated all of
the slaves within the United States and this was a huge turn point because at
this point in 1865 the union was not able to do that so if you wanted some
more information around Juneteenth that is the official day that it started and
of course just recently it became a holiday that we celebrate each and every
year here in the United States June 21st is summer solstice and this is the start
of summer in the northern hemisphere and it’s also the day with the most hours of
daylight so enjoy it you’re going to get the most daylight of the entire year that day
make sure you’re taking advantage of June 21st also June 24th that is
mid-summer day and this is the midpoint of growing season this is halfway
between the planting and the harvesting season so many cultures celebrate June
23rd as mid-summers Eve of course making June 24th mid-summer’s day nation did
you know about all those holidays maybe you added some on your calendar and it’s
my hope you’re just celebrating each and every day on your own but now you’ve got
some extra reasons to celebrate now here are some events you may want to
celebrate by putting on your calendar the American Waterworks Association is
having their Ace 23 conference June 11th through 14th in Toronto Canada this is
where the Water Treatment Community comes together to learn connect and Inspire to solve Global Water Challenges
the awra which stands for the American Water Resource Association Summer
Conference is taking place June 17th through 19th in Denver Colorado this is
where stakeholders across multiple disciplines come together to design
integrate and Implement programs necessary to better connect land and
water planning and policy we’ll have information about this on our show notes
page so you can learn more and then finally the weftec conference which is
taking place in Chicago is your place to learn experience touch feel all of the
latest greatest equipment and take Technologies in the water industry build
new relationships and figure out how you can serve your customers better this
will be September 30th through October 4th to find out more go to our events
page where we will have all of this and more for you to browse right at your
fingertips Nation I do want to urge you to use our web page which is scaling up
h2o.com we pack a lot of information Within
These podcasts and I know that this podcast format is so beneficial to our
industry because we spend so much time driving to and from our accounts well
when we’re driving we can’t take notes but don’t worry about that just get in
the habit that after you listen to an episode you go to scalingop h2o.com and
we will have everything about that show everything about the events that we
mentioned for you two at your pleasure your leisure your safety go through and
make sure that you are getting all the information that you need from this
podcast Nation you know I’m always urging you to go to the events that we
talk about here on the podcast well one of the organizations that we really try
to promote because it’s been so good to me is the association of water
Technologies and at last year’s conference in Vancouver Canada I saw a
paper delivered that I thought was so well thought out and had some of the
best demonstrations that I remember seeing in a very long time I wanted to
bring that to you so Nation here is that interview
I have not one but two Lab Partners today so let me please introduce Louis
godbout and Samina along you lesso of tgwt Welcome both to the scaling up
Podcast thank you for having us thank you well I was lucky to be at Vancouver
last year and the presentation that you both gave I thought was one of the best
demonstrated presentations of you user participation our audience participation
you guys had visual aids it was so well done and I’m really excited to share
with the scaling up Nation what you all found during your research of that paper well we’re glad to share we were very
excited to be there too although we got wet well I I got Samina wet in doing
those demonstrations I will say that is the first presentation that I’ve ever
been to at awt where there was a designated Splash Zone in the front row yes
well before we get started talking about that uh how about we introduce you both to the scaling up Nation so Samina why
don’t we start with you do you mind telling the scaling up Nation a bit about yourself ah yes of course so I basically joined
uh tgwt two years ago and uh the first thing I did when I joined was to
actually work on this project that we’ve held in for two years before sharing
with everyone a little bit about my background so I’m trained as a chemical engineer and I also did my masters also
in chemical engineering but a bit more on the wastewater treatment side so I’m
technically a bit of a newbie when it comes to the industrial water treatment side excellent well you could not tell
any of that newbiness at all from your presentation so you you are no longer a
newbie you are a seasoned veteran yes she’s a quick learner and I you know it
was the most wonderful addition to our team everybody in tgwt want to steal her
away from the lab and that’s good in a way because she gets some field experience but uh so I’m
I’m Louis godbu I’ve been with tgwt for uh over six years now but I hail from
The Pulp and Paper industry I I worked as an academic associate at McGill University’s Pulp and Paper Research
Center it’s a center that’s existed since 1927 and the gist of my research
initially was on cellulose and cellulose liquid crystals I have many patents on
these uh wonderful colorful materials and then I moved on more to colloidal
science and because it’s important in the Pulp and Paper industry as well as in
wastewater treatment you know getting things to flocculate together so joining tgwt for me was a really big
change in my career going from an institution to a small business that’s uh really something you know you you
look at the numbers and eventually I I became a shareholder a small shareholder
and so uh I believe in what we do and I
enjoy myself as never before I’m the boss you see in my little section you know for for
the two of us but we’re really colleagues Amina and I you know it’s very enjoyable working with her if
somebody listening hasn’t heard of tgwt how would you describe what you all do
oh shall I ever go see me now okay
the main goal of tgwt is uh you know our
slogan is to make a water treatment simple durable and affordable or
profitable so the more General goal is to offer vegetal extracts for water treatment and
that’s nothing new because the very first treatment that worked in a boiler
was tenon-based but things have been refined and you know the chemistry is
complicated as you’ll see but we’re really proud of our accomplishments
so I’ve been told that tgwt stands for the guys with tannin is that right the
tenant guys and girls yes yes I just think that’s so cool that’s the real name this was because we had another
name and you know every time we came across people at the awt especially they
would say oh you’re the tenant guys and So eventually we we we changed that but
it could the tgwt could also stand for the green water treatment okay various
interpretations well I’m curious you all have so much to
do and then out of the blue you decided we’re going to study carryover tell us
about that okay well why carryover that that was the first one of the first questions
that was asked of me you know as I said I I’ve done fundamental research on uh
you know biopolymers especially cellulose but you know lignin as well and hemicellulosis tannins were new to
me as a an area of study but the first thing that I was asked here was why in
most of our insulations can we go beyond the asme limits and that seemed like a
question I could answer easily but I was misled by the information that you find
in any you know boiler manual or handbook because the explanations that
are given for high TDS carryover are just wrong and initially you know I
wanted to build or construct or have access to a surface tension measurement
a paradise that would work at high pressures and temperatures but the only one I found was at the Soviet
aeronautical Institute and it probably didn’t exist anymore
but uh because tgwt offers a treatment that that is
Affordable and that saves Gas and Water by cycling up we wanted to understand
why you know there were many mysteries about uh tannins and because the
chemistry is complicated it’s not obvious I don’t know if you recall but a few years back I did a presentation on
the passivation layer comparing the passivation layer that that develops
with tannins versus other chemistries and that was the first step but the
carryover issue was really fundamental we’ve had some of our customers who had
like problems that they could not solve immediately you know a blocked blow down
valve and we have documented evidence of
boilers operating at 77 000 conductivity with the condensate conductivity at uh
15 or you know they’re about micro Siemens so that’s like just incredible
and it it but but what we found more fundamentally is that you know this type
of carryover is intimately linked with the other types of carryover the that
semina will will go over the reason we started this was really why why does it
work why has it been working and if you look in the history of time and treatment you see mentions of that that
it prevents carry over there’s less foaming and you know these documents
date back centuries really let’s define a couple of terms so we’ve talked about Tan in a couple times if
you were to introduce to the audience and somebody out there listening has never heard of that technology how would
you define that well I would say it’s uh one molecule
does all because 10 ends they have been of great industrial significance
throughout history and actually the first chemical test that was ever described and that’s I’m talking around
70 A.D Pliny the Elder describes how tannins will form a complex a dark
precipitate with iron salts and so there’s a love story between iron and
tannins but also with hardness with other metals they form complexes and the
very funny thing about it all is when you find all that information in an old
book a rare book and I’m a book collector so I know about that the ink that is used is actually iron tannate
it’s that black bluish black precipitate and that that was the find that’s
permanent ink you know if you look at you know legal definitions of permanent ink and recipes for permanent ink it’s
always or was for a very very long time iron tane and so tannins were the
discovery that tannins could prevent scaling that was uh you know very early
in the 19th century and because tannins were ubiquitous because they were used
to make leather and before plastic everything was made of leather you know the the Saddles horses shoes shoe soles
you have to imagine this world of the 19th and early 20th century where
leather and it’s still present with us and the industry is a very well
established industry the tannin extract industry it’s made Millions over the
years it’s now mostly based in South America built in South Africa as well
but in the United States entire forests where the trees had good bark with full
of tannins the forests were stripped of the tannins because it was more precious
the wood there was wood everywhere that was worthless but the tannins you know the tannin extract companies in the
1880s they were the Google of the time you know in terms of the you know the
capitalization and of course you know railroads and transportation took over them but they
remain a valuable product but the problem with studying tenants is that
their chemistry is extremely complex their form they’re small oligomers and
there are four monomers that can be linked in two different ways and
different species of trees and plants they have different forms of tannins but
what we know about tannins their function in nature is linked to their function as a tanning agent for making
leather because they are a protection for the tree they will attach very
tightly to proteins and so they will deactivate the bacterial or fungi
enzymes and that’s why in leather when you seep a piece of animal skin in a
tendon solution the tannin will absorb and stabilize the the proteins and
prevent them from rotting and degrading and if you take it into your mouth tip
your Tenon it’s extremely astringent you know because it reacts with the you know the the proteins in your saliva the
proteins on the Linings of your mouth and uh you know of course even if people
have not heard of tannin and water treatment they’ve heard of tannin and wine if they’re wine drinkers and the
the same reason that your red wine goes bad is the reason that you can use it on
a boiler it’s a tannins reactor readily with oxygen and so that that’s why
they’re also an oxygen scavenger so the next time you have a bad bottle of wine you just throw it in the boiler and
we’re good to go well if it’s bad it’s already taken up the oxygen so uh but
but this is not an easy reaction Joe 10 ends with oxygen it’s a Cascade of
reactions it can go in several ways depending on ph temperature so those are
the fundamental things about tannins is that they scavenge oxygen they act as
Crystal modifiers they act as this persons and they also complex metals and
form these precipitate so tannin treated boilers they will form like if if
there’s a lot of hardness entering the boiler they will form a sludge that will
be blown down rather than forming a scale so with all of that let’s move to the
other term that we’re talking about today and that is carryover how would you define that oh let Samina have a go
at that so that’s uh ongoing work of two years so I think Louis was talking
earlier about some common misconceptions and it’s funny because when I started I
started directly with this project and as I was learning the basics of a boiler
and a cooling tower I was also asked to solve this really complex question so
the process of it was uh was really fun to come at it from both sides but coming
back to the to the carryover so Louis mentioned there are two main misconceptions so you have we think that
high alkalinity makes the water soapy and therefore you have more bubbles the
creases the surface tension which Louis mentioned is not true and then we also often focused on the form as being just
at the surface but as we dug into this whole phenomenon we realized that we can
tentatively categorize carry over maybe in three different sections so the first
one would be maybe more mechanical and that’s what we call priming so for instance when you have a high demand of
steam or when you have new equipment add it into your line and you have multiple boilers and they’re not well balanced
then you can have what we call priming where you have a depressurization and
then this causes a surge of boiling the next one would be more on the chemical
side meaning contamination so for instance if you have animal or vegetal
fats and oils add that high pH they will get saponified and then you’ll have this
foam that you’ll see at the surface but the third one which is what we actually
focused on so the third type of carryover which is high TDS High dissolved solid Lids that was really the
Beast of the whole project because what we realized is instead of focusing at the surface at the foaming on the
surface we actually had to go look at the bulk of the solution and realize
that what you have high amounts of dissolved solids but not any type of
salt which that’s a whole other chapter but we realized that there’s this
phenomenon that happens which is a bubble coalescence inhibition so at the awt we did a presentation with
a lot of visuals and the reason why we did that it’s because it’s just you can’t really get it unless
you see it and it’s very simple so you know next time you boil water to make
your pasta and you throw some salt in it you’re actually going to be able to see that you have those small little bubbles
forming so this bubble coalescence inhibition actually has a Cascade of
factors that will influence how steam is formed and how carry over can happen and
to make matters even more complex priming and high TDS can sort of combine
and create sort of intensify the carryover so that’s you know I’m just
scratching the surface here but this is pretty much what we’ve been studying for the past few years and what we’ve
realized is that in the beginning we were very focused on lab experiments and sort of just looking and what one thing
at a time which is normal but as you try to transfer your lab knowledge onto the
field onto pilot scale in a big boiler you realize that it’s a lot of little
elements sort of combine and Collide and you have to basically make a lot of
measurements to really pinpoint where your carryover is coming from just recently I was at the association
of water Technology’s Technical Training and somebody asked me why is carryover such a big deal and I always like to
explain btu content and of course that’s the energy that’s doing the work and
steam on its worst day has 1150 BTUs where water on its best day has a
hundred and eighty and just by knowing that you can see that there’s just not enough energy to work so the fact that
you all are helping us make sure that our boilers are putting out the right
amount of BTUs and studying all of this in the lab are going to make all of us better water treaters so we can
understand what’s going on so with that being said I’m curious so you decided
you’re going to discover what is carryover how do we affect it and what
did you do then how did you decide how you were going to test it well I had a
Eureka moment and that were you in a bathtub actually
I was in the water but I was looking at the water not plunging into it so the reason that
this has escaped you know the true reason for a carryover the reason that it it’s escaped to the common knowledge
is that that was confusion we were not the first to try and see you know how
Bubbles work in a boiler and when we did try to see videos you know we went like
on the spirax Sarco site and other sites where they build the transparent boilers
and you can see what is going on but the problem with some of these boilers is
that they build a part at the surface and so when they see the foaming they
increase the conductivity and then when they reach that critical point they say
well foam accumulates and then in one of these videos they even simulate wait an
image below where you see Like Big Bubbles and then foam at the surface and
that would be the case if the the carryover were caused by contamination you know oily contamination and that is
really the classical case of you know making bubbles with soap and reducing the surface tension but you know it’s
the reverse that happens in a boiler the salts that accumulate typically in a boiler they will increase the surface
tension so what is going on well it turns out that in the 1920s there was
this professor at Ohio University his name was folk and he built an
appropriate boiler to study from the bottom to the top the flow of these
bubbles but he confused two things when you increase the TDS or conductivity are
there more small bubbles generated or is it that the bubbles do not coalesce and
he wavered between the two eventually he did find the solution and that led to a
lot of industrial efforts by the Dearborn Company to try and find
defoamers because you know this problem of foaming you know it dates back to the
beginning of boilers and you know people have thought of you know throwing in
just anything you know the old solution was castor oil but often in throwing in
these products are trying to develop the the products they they were confronted
with the fact that in a boiler the chemical conditions high pH high temperature is bad for almost it makes
almost everything degrade and if you keep it if you want to cycle up you’re
keeping these molecules in the boiler for a longer time so it gives them time to degrade even more but we’ll get back
to that you know the the degradation of anti-foams but the main thing think that
was discovered was and that was in the 1990s 1993 this scientists the Craig he
discovered that if you increase the concentration of uh ions you would
sometimes get inhibition of bubble coalescence but sometimes not it
depended which pairs of ions you know you have an anion A cation and he just
decided to lump them you know in two categories he called them Alphas or
betas and if you have two Alphas or two betas you concentrate them you get inhibition of bubble coalescence but if
you have an alpha and a beta then you can concentrate them you know as high as
the solution will hold them and you will never get that and that was the start of
a really serious effort to understand you know physically and chemically what
is going on with this bubble coalescence and so they they went into a lot of
measurements and you know there are a thousand ways of measuring bubble size
uh going from uh you know turbidity to uh image analysis and I’m skipping quite
a few more sophisticated one but the consequences of having small bubbles as
Samina said this is something you can observe for boaters who bring their boats on freshwater lakes and in
seawater if they look back at the Wake they will see that there’s a lot more
persistent foaming behind their boat when they’re in seawater and in seawater
also you get a lot more of uh you know foamy waves and that is because when the
wave captures and brings down into the water some of the air it creates small
bubbles that will not coalesce it’s just above the critical pie sea water and
that has an Enviro environmental aspect to it too because these small bubbles one of the consequences of having small
bubbles is that the pressure inside a small bubble this is an experiment that people will a demonstration that is
typical if you’ve taken classes in surface chemistry you take a big bubble
you take a small bubble and they’re connected by a tube and you have your
students guess you know when I open the valve what will happen and people think they will equilibrate you’ll get two
bubbles of the same size but that’s not true at all what happens is that the small bubble collapses and all the air
goes into the bigger bubble because the pressure inside a big bubble is much
less than in a small bubble it varies with the the inverse of the radius this
is very very well known and the consequence of this in a boiler if you
have small bubbles that are created at the hot surface which is what you want
they will detach from that surface and start by their buoyancy they will start
floating up but they will reach a terminal speed and that terminal speed is proportional to the square of the
radius so if you just have a like in your hand take a fizzy drink and look at
bubbles moving up you will see that big bubbles move up very much faster you
know as I said the square of the radius is the terminal speed that’s far as sphere you know of course bubbles are
not perfect spheres but you know it’s a gross approximation and so what what
that means in the boiler having small bubbles is that they are moving slowly
and therefore for a given amount of steam that you want to produce there’s
more of these small bubbles that are slowly getting to the surface and so
instead of having 10 10 or 15 percent of of steam In Your Water Mass you have 20
or 30. once you reach a critical point where the bubbles are small and that
makes that big water Mass extremely sensitive uh small variations in
pressure it will just expand very quickly there’s no need of a phase transition so that’s one reason that
small bubbles are bad the other reason is that if the bubbles are really really small then because the pressure inside
them is so high that means that once they reach the surface and break open
their pressure is so high that they eject material and once again if you have a soft drink in which the bubbles
are very fine and you get your nose close to it you’ll feel or even if you
put a small piece of paper above it you you will see the paper will get imbibe
and so these tiny droplets they are part of the carryover because they’re salty
water from the boiler and they are easily because you know just as a small
bubble Rises slowly a small droplet Falls slowly and so it takes only a very
small amount of steam flow to carry
these small droplets and you will have wet Steam and the final reason why small
fat balls are bad is that they act as nucleation sites you know the people if
you think about it you know that everybody’s done this and they’re alive you know for fun or whatever or if you
win a car race you shake that champagne bottle and then you open it if you don’t
shake it why doesn’t it spur well it doesn’t spurt because it takes a
nucleation site for a bubble to form for that that gas in solution to go out of
solution or in the case of steam for the phase transition to occur it needs to
form an interface and because you know in theory you would need infinite
pressure in the bubble but you know because you know it’s not a smooth
system bubbles will spontaneously form but you know this is what we showed at
the awt we had a gas two bottles that we had the gasified so we dissolved CO2 in
it we couldn’t use steam the boiling water because that would have been dangerous but if if you shake one you
see immediately that the turbidity is higher in the one because the small
bubbles are not coalesce coalescing and then when you open you know they’re at
the same pressure there’s a the same amount of gas dissolved but because there are many more small bubbles when
you open the one that is above that critical concentration and it will really spark like crazy and the other
one will sort of you know do the fine spark so that’s what we discovered that
everything was linked it was a great demonstration and you all definitely prove when it comes to Bubbles Size
Matters How did you measure that in your experiments
so I have countless hours of videos on Bubble that’s all I can say
so I mean as Louis mentioned there are many ways to sort of quantify it let’s
say I know Louis before I arrived at tdwt you had uh done some maybe image
analysis and turbidity measurements when I arrived we went on a more visual at
first uh because it you can really really see it so at first we just uh we
went visual about it we used simply just an air diffuser tried different salt concentrations try different anti-foams
I had tried water before and after boiler conditions and just to get a visual feel of it let’s say then after
we we moved tried to make it a bit more technical let’s say so as Louis mentioned when you have those small
bubbles that burst at the surface because of that big pressure you get an ejection so then we thought okay that’s
another indirect way of measuring it so we came up sort of with our little
device which is patent pending that would allow us to measure that let’s say
carryover potential indirectly yes that was samina’s invention the you
know just having a conductivity probe essentially with a voltage bias to bring
those droplets that are ejected if they are but you know the the transition between coalescence and inhibition of
coalescence is not a very precise concentration it occurs over a small
range of concentration and what is really interesting and this was not our
work but the work strangely you know I worked at McGill for 20 years and Samina
uh studied at Miguel and did for Masters there as well and it turned out that
people were studying Bubbles at McGill but contrary to us we want to keep
bubbles big so that you know they rise to the surface rapidly they don’t create all these problems that I described it
turned out that in the mining and Metallurgy the department where there’s a lot of flotation well they want small
bubbles because there’s more surface area and you know to attach whatever
they’re trying to float to the surface and so they had done a lot of fundamental work and they they had built
a machine that there’s a picture of it in our publication but unfortunately it
could not work at high temperatures you know the materials and all that so we didn’t use it but they they discovered
that it’s not really the concentration of the salt if you have an appropriate
salt so you know an alpha cation an alpha anion most salts that accumulate
in boilers are alpha salts and so they will lead to carry over but what they
discovered is that there was a very big difference in concentration between monovalent salts and bivalent salts and
it turns out for instance you need three times more NaCl than a sodium sulfate
sodium sulfate you need maybe 0.1 molar and sodium chloride you need 0.3 molar
for the phenomenon to happen and this was talking to us as well because the
most common oxygen scavenger is sodium sulfite of course everybody knows
you know it’s chemistry but the reaction product of sodium sulfide is sodium sulfate and when that accumulates in the
boiler it will lead to an earlier onset you know if you’re just measuring the
concentration of that particular salt and any bivalent salt and so if you plot
all the different salts and see what their inhibition you know the critical inhibition concentration is you will get
different values but if you plot the ionic strength and I don’t know if it’s
a concept that people are familiar with but it’s essentially a measure of how
well charges will mask other charges and it’s related to the valence or to the
the charge of the ion and so ionic strength varies from material to
material but if you plot that you get a linear equation all the results fall on
the same line and so it’s really a question of ionic strength and so people
of course if if you have if you want the strategy a simple strategy for the
controlling carryover of course you can use materials that do not contribute to
adding conductivity but that’s like an obvious one
so during your experimentations you worked with defoamer what did you find
on that we we started with the basics and we started with what is typically used in
the industry and of course anti-foams were just the obvious the obvious thing
to start with and when we when we started doing the experiments obviously with the anti-foams You’re Expecting the
foam at the surface to disappear but we were like okay let’s see if antifoams actually have an effect on the bubble
coalescence which is what we’re interested in so once again took out my uh camera started filming and we
realized that yes indeed a lot of the antifoams that are presently used in the industry they do have a positive effect
on Bubble coalescence which means even at hot very very high conductivities that bubble coalescence inhibition with
an antifung present is uh is not going to happen and then we took it one step
further and we took our little uh you know pressure reactors and we’re like okay let’s see how this acts in the
actual conditions of a boiler because that’s what we’re interested in and funny thing in and Louie talked about it
earlier if if you look at typical antifoams based on polyglycols if you
put them in boiler conditions what actually happens is that they degrade into surface active substances which
means they actually create even more foam and the higher the Cycles the
higher the residence time and the more form you’re actually going to create so you’re going to keep adding more
antifoam because you’re getting foam and it’s just you know a vicious cycle so that was bad news unfortunately so
we’re like okay just forget about the polyglycols and let’s look at some other antifoams so let’s say uh silica based
antifoams um silicon so again we did we did the same test they they work
perfectly in ambient conditions you know bubble coalescence is Resort everyone’s
happy we put them in boiler conditions and the same thing again they started degrading
you know this this was a bit problematic because we’re like okay you know the the one solution that we thought we had
under control for carryover suddenly it’s not working how we thought it was going to work and I’ll give this one to
Louis but then obviously we’re like okay how come how come with tannins we seem to be able to increase that connectivity
and we’re not getting that same phenomenon there’s must be something else happening yeah so the in my
presentation I actually used the very first experiment that I did you know but
when I had my Eureka moment I immediately you know it was a simple setup I I took a fritted glass filter as
a diffuser I put it on top of a Merlin Erlenmeyer and started producing Steam
and then I just poured some water into that funnel and watched the bubbles and
actually this bubble coil let’s sense if you have a diffuser it occurs at the
very surface you you have the impression that the bubbles generated at the
surface are big to start with but that’s because they start coalescing they’re very close together in a typical Fritter
glass filter you know as soon as they touch they become big but as soon as you
add salt beyond that critical concentration that that corresponds to the asme guidelines you know roughly and
the conductivity guidelines as well so as soon as I did that I saw it became
milky you know lots of small bubbles and then I added the tannins and it reverted
to Big Bubbles and so my first idea was that having digested the fact that Alpha
cations Alpha anions beta anions beta cations and you needed to have the same
I thought well 10 ends in solution at high pH they are
anions and many of the beta anions are organic ions like acetate like if you
have sodium acetate you have an alpha cation a beta anion you can concentrate
that as much as you want the bubbles will stay big and so I thought well
adding tannins it’s sort of whatever is happening physically and that I won’t go
into because it’s too complex whatever partition of ions between the vapor and
the bulk of the water is driving this mechanism preventing bubbles even if
they if they collide together and people have done that you know having bubbles Collide at different speeds and see you
know how they resist coalescing and how they must be kept together more
depending on the ionic conditions so anyways I I thought that it was the the
presence of these beta anions the tannin anions that was the effective mechanism
but it turned out to be wrong because when we redid experiments in very pure
water we couldn’t see the phenomenon tannins didn’t work they needed an extra
little thing and that extra little thing is actually the presence of a little bit
of hardness and what is uh we haven’t proven that beyond the doubt but what we
think in terms we measured particle size using uh very well-known light
scattering experiments you know people have that in their lab the you know dynamic lights
scattering you can measure the size of a particle and it turns out that these precipitates of the calcium or magnesium
10A they have the right size to act as antifungs and so we believe that that is
the mechanism and we didn’t show that in a totally perfect manner but we showed
it empirically when you when we have a boiler we add a certain amount of tannins in pure water because we work
with an experimental boiler we went from the lab to real boilers and then we went
to bigger boilers as well but in our experimental boiler using reverse
osmosis water adding tannins and then bringing up the salt concentration it
didn’t prevent carryover but we needed to add a little bit of hardness and
people in the field they have the misconception that if their Test shows
that there’s no calcium no hardness in the softening water well it means there
is zero there is not zero there are you can use finer analytical techniques that
will you know the the limit that people have to keep in mind if they want to go
beyond the asme limits if they want to cycle up the limit that you can see with
the typical area Chrome black test you know the pink and blue transition that
everybody uses well the limit there is 0.5 but if there’s plenty four present
you won’t know and if you concentrate 0.4 a hundred times because you want to
cycle up and we do that and we’ve done that since the first day one of of our
company you know our company ourselves are based on Energy savings so we sell this product as a product
that will allow for high cycles and if you have 0.4 you don’t see it you think
you have zero you concentrate a hundred time you actually have 40. so you know
PPM of calcium and that you know we can handle but even in normal Cycles there’s
enough calcium and magnesium present to transform the tannin into an anti-form
particle that is thermally stable that’s the key thing as semina was saying
is there any liability that the water treater accepts if they exceed the asmb
limits uh well I know that in the United States it’s one of your National Sports suing
each other this is not an accurate here here too
there are a lot of lawsuits but you know these are guidelines and we quote this
in our paper because we found it interesting even on the ABM a so the
boiler manufacturers Association of America even on their website when they
explain what carryover is they say this is not you know sometimes you know this
limit must be respected otherwise you’ll get carry over but in other times not and you know there’s no explanation to
it I don’t know if you have the exact quote on fans I do actually so it says these
guidelines should not be considered absolute some systems cannot tolerate operations at this concentrations others
operate continuously yet significantly higher concentrations so it gives us a leeway because it’s a
guideline unfortunately in some countries for instance Germany where we
have our partners corn uh with which we share our knowledge and know-how and
Industrial Secrets they have a legally mandated conductivity limit and so they are bound
by that and so they’re bound not to go to higher energy and water savings and
to remind people you know the reason you’re saving in energy and in water and
if you have to pay also for treating the effluent you’re saving on all that
because you know if you’re at 20 Cycles you’re throwing away five percent of the
water that you’ve treated that you’ve purchased that you’ve heated and you
know you can try and recover the heat um most the big boilers well the you know
recover the seed but you’re still wasting a lot you know this very well because you teach it you know cycling up
your savings go down as the Cycles go up so you know if you go from uh 10 to 20
that’s a big gain from 20 to 40. it’s a diminishing return but at the end of the
year whether you save one percent or two percent or even 0.5 percent it is Big
usually and our biggest customer is a Pulp and Paper Mill that produces
billions of pounds of steam and we’ve we’ve had them for you know decades or
well close to two decades and we keep track of the savings and remind people
you know without us you were not operating at these Cycles you gotta let
them remember why you’re there yes yes I’m curious this really was a
fascinating study and I appreciate you sharing it with uh the awt audience and now the scaling up Nation what’s next
for this study well uh as we are to a research Duo
let’s put it that way we’re often uh you know at the end of a project we’re also
we are always trying to think ahead and see what uh what direction to take and
also the direction has to to align with the mission right so the green water treatment we’re trying to go into a
Greener Direction so recently we’ve uh We’ve started a new project that is a
more directed let’s say towards the uh the cooling tower side so we’re trying
to diversify we’ve I think we’ve had our share our fair share of uh of troubles
with the carryover and boilers so uh trying to look at different problems but it’s it it’s always an ongoing
continuation of researching and it’s new things always come up yeah we we have
you know what we develop principally in terms of you know similar mentioned we
have this device patent pending okay so this this device what it allows us to do
and the advantage it gives us is uh because there are so many variations and
the the the source of water the composition of water this device it
allows us to quickly evaluate the potential for cycling up so we can
simulate in the lab with a water sample how far people can go I mean as most of
your audience knows you know diagnosing why you have carry over you know you
have to delve in this you know you have to see the system see the operation see
what goes on you know if everybody at 10 o’clock opens up the valves at the same
time you know this is a mechanical issue and what what we find is that you know
most of the time carryover is due to mechanical issues but if it’s combined
with high TDS yes the problem is really worse it’s it worsens everything and it
makes a boiler more sensitive to any variation in pressure but this little
tool is uh essentially you know people can send us a water sample or they can
even send us an analysis and we can reconstitute in the lab their water
sample that matches the bottle or butter and then we can see how far can we go
how far can we go with this treatment how far can we go with that treatment and many many people you know the
mistake that they make with the anti-foams is that they overuse them and
when you start cycling up of course you know if you’re if your dosage is a
thousand PPM that in the boiler of your product whatever you’re using but you’re
at 100 Cycles you’re actually feeding 10 PPM because it will get concentrated to
a thousand in the boiler and so as you increase the Cycles you’re reducing the
amount of the antifoam that you’re putting in and allowing what is already
been injected in to degrade and so you reach a Tipping Point where you know
even if you add more anti-foam well there’s already enough of these degradation products that are actual
surfactants that will create a problem and so it’s not the solution if you look
at the history of all this the history of the development of heat stable anti-foams as I said the Dearborn
Company had two or three scientists full-time for a couple of decades and
the best that they came up with you needed to ref it worked at extremely as
all antifungal it worked at really low dosages you know less than one PPM but
it lasted an hour and then it was gone the effect was gone it degraded and so
that’s why you can’t use conventional antifoams to cycle up I don’t like
people who are not skeptical when we bring our product to people if they say oh let’s go you know we we want this
blah blah blah I don’t like it because to really run a program a high Cycle Pro
program appropriately you need to be driving carefully you know you’re
concentrating everything a hundred times and so the least little bit of failure
in your softeners you’ll be bringing loads of it and loads of hardness so
that you know this is one consideration but the the carryover consideration is
also quite critical and with tenants something that people should know is
that you know those who are totally unfamiliar tenants are colored like a boiler treated with tannins the water is
whiskey colored are bourbon or whatever your favorite you all used to say sweet
tea colored oh yes change the whiskey yeah that’s great Samina I am curious you did
such a great job presenting what was your methodology how did you prepare to
publicly speak in front of that audience thank you that’s a good question uh uh
so I prepared the hell out of it until it seemed natural so that’s the
Tipping Point you prepare a little bit you sound too prepared you prepare a lot you sound more natural at least in my
experience well Louis Cimino thank you so much for sharing what you found during this
experiment and continuing to experiment so we can all be better water treaters
thank you so much yes thank you for having us it’s really great
well once again thanks to Louis and Samina I really enjoyed your paper at
the association of water Technologies conference and I immensely enjoyed being
able to bring that to life here through the scaling of H2O podcast and bring
that information and making it available to tens of thousands of listeners now if
you are one of those listeners and of course you are because you’re listening to this their paper is going to be on
our show notes page so make sure you navigate to scalingup h2o.com and we
will have everything that they referenced there for your viewing
pleasure Nation do you have a guess that you want me to interview maybe you went
to one of the conferences that we mentioned earlier in a show and you just
found the most amazing present presentation that needs to be shared with the scaling up Nation if you have
that information please go to scalinguph2o.com go over to our show
ideas page and let us know what that is we are always looking for the best
guests to have on the scaling up H2O podcast so you can of course become
better each podcast you listen to and of
course somebody that helps us each and every week with making ourselves better here is James McDonald
hello and welcome to the periodic water table with James where we think and learn about water chemistry drop by drop
please use your week to search online ask your colleagues or even pick up a
book to learn more about each week’s periodic water table topic if you do at
the end of the year you’ll be 52 water chemistry smarter so let’s raise the water table of
knowledge together and get started today’s topic is
hydrogen peroxide or H2O2 while we may find it in our medicine
cabinets it is used as an industrial water treatment too first what are these uses
how is hydrogen peroxide introduced into a system do you purchase pure hydrogen peroxide
or is it generated in situ if in situ what other chemicals are
involved is hydrogen peroxide fast or slow acting what can cause a hydrogen peroxide
solution to decompose is this decomposition reaction exothermic or endothermic
what are the reaction byproducts of decomposed hydrogen peroxide can decomposition cause a dangerous
situation how do you test for hydrogen peroxide remember knowledge is power and taking
the time to learn more about water chemistry each week will help make you a force to be reckoned with
be sure to post what you learn to social media and tag it with hashtag water table23 and hashtag scalingup H2O I look
forward to learning more from you thank you James Nation I hope you have
so many things to celebrate this June and I hope one of the things that you
celebrate is scheduling to take your certified water technologist examination
I talk a lot about the cwt examination if you are in the same type of water
treatment that I am because that defines to the world that you are among the
people that are making this industry better you are committed to it and those
three letters beyond your name let everybody know that but here’s what it
also does Nation when you get your cwt I promise it will unlock this unfound
confidence within you and it will drive you to be become better because you
achieve something that is just amazing and you will not want to stop there it
is the key to unlocking your desire to
become such an amazing Force Through understanding in our industry so I urge
you to schedule to take your cwt today and to bring you a little bit of help I
have a free course explaining exactly what you need to do in order to obtain
your certified water technologist designation and you can get that free
gift by going to scalingup h2o.com forward slash cwt prep once again that’s
scaling up h2o.com forward slash C W T
prep Nation I sure enjoy bringing you this podcast and I hope that you make today
the best day this year we’ll have a brand new episode for you next Friday
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