Scaling UP! H2O

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The following transcript is provided by YouTube. Mistakes are present. To hear the podcast episode, click HERE.

[Music]
welcome to scaling up the podcast for water treatise by water treaters where
we’re scaling up on knowledge so we don’t scale up our systems everybody tres Blackmore here the host of scaling
up and folks I gotta tell you I am so excited of how many people have signed
up to take the CWT challenge if you’re a
listener of scaling up you know that at the end of 2017 I put out a challenge to
all water treaters if you’re gonna be in this industry be the best you can be in
this industry and get your certified water technologist designation well so
many of you have taken me up on that challenge and I know that because you’ve gone to scaling up h2o comm /c WT and
you’ve reached out for my five tips that anybody who’s taken the CWT examination
needs to know and this is information that I’ve gathered from many people who
have taken the cw2 exam that give just gives you a little bit of a boost with some advantages of what other people
have learned so I can pass that on to you now if you haven’t taken advantage of that yet please feel free to go on
the site and start preparing to take that CWT even if you’re brand new in the
industry today is the day that you start studying for that even if it’s five
years away you got to start somewhere I’m urging you to make that today a lot
of you have written in to me and said Trace what exactly is reverse osmosis or
you’ve asked me specific questions about RO systems and I’ve happily answered
those online but I will tell you that I have today one of the best experts on
reverse osmosis his name is Wes Byrne and he has literally written the book on
reverse osmosis systems now the books called reverse osmosis a practical guide for industrial
users I’ll give you a link at the end of the show to make sure if you want that book you can get it I’m going to tell
you that that book has been on my shelves for many many years and I reference that every time I have a
question about RO now Wes has been working with RO for well over 40 years
he knows everything ro and I called him up and I asked him I said Wes would you come on scaling up and explain to the
scaling up nation what ro is what are some of the things that we need to be looking forward what are some of the
most common items we need to know to troubleshoot and he said absolutely I would love to come on the show so I hope
you enjoy my interview with Wes burn my lab partner today is Wes burn of pure
water cloud probably one of the best ro experts out there we’re gonna be talking
about ro but Wes I want to thank you for coming on the show and explaining to the
scaling-up nation what the heck RO is how are you today I am doing great I am
happy to be here well we are happy to have you here so our audience can get to
know you a little bit better do you mind telling us a little bit about yourself I’ve been working with RO systems in
high purity water for over 38 years now that includes design engineering field
support monitoring troubleshooting piloting new applications developing
products related to RO systems and membrane systems I think my special
forte that I take pride in is my ability to fix troublesome RO units ones that
others haven’t been able to get a handle on I’ve been able to get those problems
resolved and get that RO system working more more appropriately how did you get into that industry I graduated from
Purdue back in 79 and most of my classmates were getting jobs in the oil
industry and but I want to do something different so I took a job at hewlett-packard in in northern Colorado
at HP I specialized in their supporting their facilities equipment there when
they that included high purity water systems related to semiconductor manufacturing so I got to know high
purity water I liked working with the RO systems and you know things just kind of moved on from there and ended up taking
a job in California Silicon Valley working for an equipment manufacturer
doing mostly business in the semiconductor industry and I got to work with virtually all over a hundred RO
systems located around the world and really got to improve my skills with
respect to RO systems and high purity water equipment as I mentioned before you are I think vs expert when it comes
to reverse osmosis I’ve got a copy of your book reverse osmosis a practical guide for industrial users lots of great
information in there but before we get to all of that great information let’s
back up a little bit and what exactly is reverse osmosis RO is a great way to
separate contaminants from water it involves a special membrane that’s able
to allow water to permeate through it but not dissolve salts now it’s not the
same as filtration because a common filter is not going to remove dissolved salts but an RO membrane can maybe I
should keep going with that so like like a filter an RO membrane is is driven by
pressure but instead of pushing the water through physical holes in that
membrane I like to think of it as the water working its way through the RO
membrane polymer structure so it’s more on a molecular scale because that
membrane an ro membrane is able to remove virtually a hundred percent of any suspended solids in the water and
any bacteria there’s no way that those materials can get through that membrane
polymer structure and in the process it will also remove around 98 percent of
the dissolved salts as well so what applications require reverse osmosis ro
is best suited economically speaking really for any process that requires the
removal of dissolved salts it’s the the cheapest way to remove those salts and
has the added benefit then or removing particles bacteria and bacterial
particles also remove 100 percent of organics at least the ones that are
larger than around 150 Dalton’s so it removes the vast majority of
contaminants so anytime we put an ro into a water treatment system we end up with highly purified water relative to
what we started with so theoretically let’s pretend we are touring a facility
and we figure out that the best solution is to install a reverse osmosis system
what is some of the information that we need to collect on that survey the more
we can find out about the quality of the water the more information we’ll have
that can then be used to design the RO system and the equipment upstream of the
RO system the the RO pretreatment equipment is is really as important as
the RO design itself with respect to dealing with the particular water quality so the more we can find out
about the not just the the ionic contaminants in the in the water but
also the suspended solids the organics that can then lead to biological
activity and the potential for biological fouling the more we can learn about the nature of that water the more
we’ll know what to how to design the RO system and its pretreatment equipment
ideally if we could put a pilot system in place and run that system for a couple of months then we’re going to
know even more about how our expected designs are gonna operate with that
particular water quality and its variability well us what are some of the reoccurring tests that you would do to
determine that the unit was working properly once it was properly installed we need to
monitor the various pressures and flow rates you know typically our RO
equipment manufacturers will provide various monitoring instruments with their equipment you know things like
flow sensors and pressure gauges water temperature all those all those
variables need to be monitored they’re there for a reason if we’re changing the pH of the water or if the pH changes
naturally we should monitor that if the water temperature is changing we need to monitor that if we add a chemical to the
water we need to monitor for its concentration and if we need to get rid of that chemical we need to monitor its
absence so all the things that can affect the performance of the RO system that need to be monitored and that
includes the pretreatment equipment filters any pressures flow rates that we
have on those units they need to be monitors well since their performance will affect potentially affect the
performance of the RO unit one good instrument for monitoring the potential
for fouling in an RO system is the silt density index measurement that’s the
monitor is the relative plugging of 0.45 micron filter and that’s really one of
the best ways to monitor for fouling solids that might be present in an RO
feed stream as well as how well the pretreatment quipment is performing in
reducing that that silt density index as a means of reducing the fouling of the
RO system and then that relates them to the cleaning frequency of how often
we’re going to clean that RO system due to fouling you mentioned pretreatment what are some examples of that certainly
every nearly every RO system has cartridge filters located directly
upstream of the RO unit as kind of a last resort filter to make sure that
debris and and larger particles don’t get into the RO system that might firmly
plug the lead in membrane elements or possibly damaged the high-pressure pump as part of that RO system beyond that
it’s very common to have a multi media filter like a pressure is multimedia filter as a means of
reducing the suspended solids in a water source in cruder water source for
pulling directly out of river or a lake we might have a clarification system we
might have a cold lime softening system the particular pretreatment of course will have a lot to do with the quality
of the incoming water and how bad it is for that RO system with if we had to put
it in the RO system are there more common signs than others that there are issues going on with the RO system with
all those instruments that were recording the flow rates and pressures we can take those variables and put
everything into three calculations that to a great extent will tell us
everything that’s going on with that RO system so those three performance variables are the the percent salt
rejection which is how well the RO system is removing the dissolved salt in the feed water the normalized permeate
flow rate which is how well the membrane is permeating water that tells us if
there is something preventing the membrane from permeating water if such
as there’s solids on the membrane surface and the third variable is normalized pressure drop which is the
resistance to flow through the spiral-bound membrane elements so if we get large particles filling in the
channels as the water is going through those membrane elements it will cause an increase in the normalized pressure drop
and that tells us how badly that restriction to flow is occurring and
often then the the best two of those variables that give us the best
indications of when to clean the RO system will end up being the normalized permeate flow rate and the normalized
pressure drop less in its most simplistic terms how would you explain what reverse osmosis is how does it work
if we start with the basic principle of osmosis we is a common issue related to biology in
biology you have something called a semipermeable membrane in cells and what
have you and and and that membrane will allow water to pass through more than it
will allow salts to pass through and the direction that the water flows will be
affected by the difference in salt concentrations across the from one side
of the membrane to the other so you’ll tend to have water moving from a pure
water side to a more saline side on side containing more salt essentially in an
effort to dilute that that saltwater side in reverse osmosis we are simply
applying a pressure to that saltwater side that then forces the water
molecules to hit that semipermeable membrane harder and then we get a higher
penetration rate and passage rate of water molecules from the saltwater side
to the pyramid permeate side and thus we’re able to take salt water and
convert most of it to pure water how long should the membrane last I hear
this question a lot that the typical membrane warranty pro-rated warranty is
for three years so a lot of people think that that’s how long the membrane should
last and they may replace their membrane after three years because that’s how long it should last you know they’re
really doing okay if they get three years membrane life some people don’t even get that you know for various
problems they have along the way but there are also systems out there where the membrane has lasted more than 15
years and and so what it really comes down to is if you you take really good
care the membrane you know put in excellent pretreatment and clean the RO system then when it needs to be cleaned
and maintained excellent performance of the RO membrane don’t allow that membrane to exposed to free chlorine
which can readily damage the membrane and yeah you can end up getting 10 to 15
years life out of that brain how many membranes have you seen that got 10 to 15 years of life if I was
to throw out a percentage I would say less than 5% Wes is that because the
people that they’re just simply not doing what you just described I think that that’s that’s true and and and
really it’s sometimes it’s not it’s not practical it may not be cost-effective to put that
much money into the pretreatment or into the ro design as necessary in order to
get that kind of life out of the RO membrane it’s more cost-effective to actually replace the membrane elements
more frequently but in cases where that replacement is required on less than an
annual basis then we really should be looking at the at the typically the pretreatment as a means of improving the
quality of that pretreatment and getting more life than that single year out of those membrane elements so obviously
when you have any type of system you’re going to have issues what are some of
the basic troubleshooting tips that you’ve amassed over your career that you can share with our audience on ro
whenever we have a problem there are certain things that we want to do that I
would do when I’m called in to troubleshoot a system you know one of
the first things is to make sure that our instruments are reading correctly
because it’s really embarrassing to spend a lot of time troubleshooting a
system only to find out that it was just a bad instrument reading all along so
the first thing is to verify that our instruments are good and and that what we’re seeing is actually what we’re
seeing from there we need to define the the nature of the problem how it’s
affecting the system and isolate where that problem is most evident within the
system see most of the problems with RO systems are not that unique you know
someone has previously experienced that and and so you know having been around
for a long time and seen a lot of these problems if we can figure out the nature of the problems it’s pretty easy to find that common
problem that is responsible for the particular systems so you know first you
know after after knowing our instruments are good then we need to know how it’s a the problem is affecting the salt
rejection how it’s affecting the normalize permit flow rate how it’s affecting the normalized pressure drop and trying to isolate within the RO
system where it’s having the most impact within the system is it it was it where the water first comes into the membrane
elements or maybe it’s more of a problem where the water exits the membrane elements at the concentrate end of the
system the particular locations where the problem is most evident will certain
types of problems if the problem is that the concentrate in the system a common
problem that causes the kind of damage there is is salt formation we may be
scaling up the concentrate into the system a common problem that may affect
the entire system causing the salt rejection decline would be exposing the whole system to free chlorine or the
free chlorine may react a little bit more pronounced ly more strongly at the
lead end but will continue to react through the membrane elements as the water passes through the RO system if we
end up getting a lot of large particles or biological materials into entering
the RO system they’re gonna tend to plug up those lead in membrane elements causing a big pressure drop increase
across the initial membrane vessels where the water first enters the system so the more we can define what’s going
on within the system how it’s affecting the variables and and where problem is
most isolated where it’s more more prevalent within the system the easier it is to figure out what the problem is
based on experience and common sense in many cases do you have an example of
something that you would be able to detect as a problem that a lay person
wouldn’t just because of your years of experience I have the advantage
of having seen that a lot of crazy things over the years
so with phat background going it causes
me to look more deeply into issues that others would take for granted I’m going
to tend to look more closely at every valve in a system to make sure that you
know valve that is supposed to be totally closing to make sure that does totally closed an inlet valve that leaks
a little bit will destroy an RO system if we have chlorinated water upstream of that RO system I look closer at how the
RO system is plumbed if we have an outlet line that opens to atmosphere beneath the RO system that’s going to
tend to pull a siphon effect on the RO when it shuts down if the RO concentrate
line is plumbed to a common waste stream when that RO system shuts down there may
be nothing to prevent the contaminants within that waste stream from diffusing
back through that concentrate pipe into the membrane elements and destroying the
concentrate and membrane elements so yeah I know the importance of every
aspect of the RO system and I’m going to make sure every part every piece of that
RO system is working the way it’s supposed to be working and then so I’m just a little more driven than most
people are to figure out what the problem is fair enough you said you’ve seen a lot of crazy things in your years
of experience tell us about one of the craziest things that you’ve seen yeah I’m just flashing on various
incidents it’s always fun to open up a
lead in membrane vessel or cartridge filter housing and and find things that
just aren’t supposed to be there yeah that that can be rodents it can be birds
it can be a whole lot of black fungus it
was a plastic army man in my case it’s
always one when we have the flexibility of having a sense of humor beyond that some
of the more difficult unique things have happened when when dealing with waste
streams when we’re dealing with a water source that that contains things that that it’s not supposed to contain yell
then then it becomes an issue of trying to figure out in that particular facility what all might have gotten into
the water source to have the bizarre effect that it’s having on the RO membrane and that that can be a very
difficult challenge which is why people like you are employed right yeah so far
so good well you mentioned cleaning several
times can we talk a little bit about what the cleaning process is cleaning a
spiral-wound RO membrane system involves putting together a first a cleaning
solution of a particular aggressive pH that might be an acidic low pH or an
alkaline high pH depending upon what we’re trying to clean for that cleaning
solution may have other agents in it like surfactants detergents or chelating
agents to assist in destabilizing the particular fouling solids that might be
within the membrane elements so then we can take that that cleaning solution we
can heat it up you know not always but it certainly works a lot faster if we’re dealing with a warmer solution you up to
the limits of the membrane elements typically we don’t want to go over have most 105 degrees Fahrenheit maybe even
less than that if we’re also going for an aggressive pH all related to what the
membrane manufacturers will allow us to use with their membrane and then we’ll take that solution and we want to put it
through the membrane elements using a high velocity a high flow rate at low
pressure when we use a little pressure then we’re not going to make a lot of permeate water and that means we’re not
going to create a four against the membrane surface that’s going to otherwise tend to hold the
filing solids against the membrane service we want we want that that clean
solution to flow freely across the surface and dislodge those filing solids
and get them to either dissolve or become suspended in the cleaning solution and get them out of there we
can monitor the progress of that cleaning by monitoring the pressure and flow rate and as long as our pressure is
declining or a flow rate is increasing we know we’re know we’re making progress at least with larger following particles
that tend to affect the pressure drop and we have to keep cleaning until we can get that membrane system back to its
original performance we do so if we rinse that system out put it back online
and our baseline performance has been restored we know that we have an effective cleaning and everybody’s happy
everyone’s real happy at that point yep well the scaling up nation we have
people that have been in this industry for weeks we have people that have been in this industry like yourself for
almost 40 years so everybody starts from the same point they’re trying to learn what is the best
advice you can give somebody who’s trying to learn more about this topic
well there’s certainly our resources out there in the age of the internet there’s
things that that can be learned from memory manufacturers site from equipment
manufacturers sites certainly I offer a lot of materials my my RO book that will provide you a great
background for learning the the industry I’ve got various other training
materials on cd-rom or online that’s available with the internet you do have
to be somewhat concerned about getting misinformation so you know be certainly use a credible source there there is
some bad information out there that is somewhat misleading Wes you’re telling me everything on the internet isn’t true
[Laughter] unfortunately no and and it is amazing
what when something incorrect will get on the internet how it gets copied and and
reused on various sites so yeah I saw some information about about chloramines
and and its relation to free chlorine and ammonia that was wrong when it was
first published 25 years ago and it’s still there getting transferred around in various websites so yeah we you want
to make sure that you’re looking at at a good source and it isn’t just something that you found on Google great advice
what are some of the innovations that are coming out in reverse osmosis over
the last I don’t know 15 years or so membrane manufacturers have been have
done some really good work in coming up with a better more stable
polyamide thin film membrane you know one that that is able to tolerate better
than the previous membrane exposure to pH extremes exposure to free chlorine
not not to say that doesn’t damage the membrane but it can handle it for a longer exposure than previously they’ve
done a good job coming up with low fouling membrane that you know membrane that is less more resistant to having
particles stick to it initially they’ve done a good job increasing the spacing
sizing between membrane leaves so that pressure drop is less and the membrane
elements clean up better using the 34 mil spacing and there have been some
even more recent improvements in that spacing material to get a more direct
path of flow through the membrane elements so that particles don’t get caught up within that spacing material
and end up following the membrane elements there’s been work done with with forward osmosis using other
materials other solvents on the permeate side in order to reduce the pressure
requirements related to osmosis and reverse osmosis that that’s really just
in the beginning stages in my opinion were probably will see a lot more progress than that in the future how do
you see ro in high purity water helping us with the water crisis into the future
ro gives us the ability to more economically take a water stream that
might have previously been unusable and turn it into something very valuable you
know the obvious example there is is desalination of taking reverse osmosis
with seawater and getting pure water out of that seawater you know we’re seeing
increased use of that in United States we see that in in California and
certainly Florida and Texas in industrial waste streams and in
municipal waste streams we’re seeing ro being applied to those streams to be able to recover more of that water for
use where we would have never thought of using that water as a water source in
years past example there would be in using municipal wastewater treating with
RO as a means of coming up with high purity water for some new power plants
going in that use municipal grey water as a water source
ro makes that possible reuse of water within a plant zero liquid discharge
systems are often made possible with reverse osmosis on the tail end of the
system to be able to pull out the salts and contaminants and allow that water to be reused within the plan ro in my mind
is is a miracle process and it it’s use just keeps expanding within the world of
water what is the one thing that you want listeners to get from this
presentation I would like everyone to understand especially ones that it had
formerly had problems with RO systems that a properly designed monitored and
maintained ro system will provide you many years of excellent performance
without major problems there there are those that have had a few bad
experiences because they got some bad equipment and they want to blame that on reverse osmosis technology and ro
technology is not to blame for those problems the job just wasn’t done right
for that particular person well definitely some of the things that you’ve shared with us here today are
going to help us make sure that we’re making better decisions when it comes to ro and I’m definitely going to list out
some of the resources that you mentioned for us earlier in the show but we’re not
quite done yet I’ve got a couple of lightning round questions for you if you’re ready for those I am grabbing on
to my armrest here I’m ready fair enough well I want to ask you to get into the
DeLorean with me we’re gonna turn the flux capacitor on we’re gonna set the
time circuits back to 38 years ago the first day that you started working with
ro and you’re gonna have the ability to go back in time and give yourself advice
what advice would you give yourself based on what you know now as a new
engineer I could have been a little more opening open rather to get to seeking
out the assistance of knowledgeable people and with that assistance
I could have checked out things I was planning to do and specifically what
comes to mind is I might have learned from someone that may be using activated
carbon as a means of getting rid of a hydrogen peroxide solution that we just
used to sanitize the piping system maybe putting that through an activated carbon
filter is not such a good idea gotcha all right so my final question
the point value is double here so it’s anybody’s game at this point if you
could talk to Eddie body throughout history who would it be with and why I guess what comes to my mind there would
be Thomas Edison because he lived at a time when electricity was just we people
were just beginning to understand electricity and all the possible ways where that technology could be applied
there were so many potential projects and technological possibilities it just
must have been a terribly exciting time and I think it would just be so much fun to have been a have been able to share
that with Thomas Edison and and all the exciting things that he was working on well that’s a great answer I want to
thank you for coming on scaling-up I know I learned a lot our audience is learning a lot and of course we we want
to keep on learning I’m gonna mention some of the resources that you talked about earlier so they can link directly
to that in my show notes page but again thanks for coming on the show and telling us a little bit more about what
our Oh is thank you I enjoyed it well folks a lot of you have asked me why do
I do this show and I’ve told you the real reason which is I truly do want to
increase what this industry is and how we treat it but the other reason is I
get to talk to some of the people that have written books that I have used for
years as reference that’s just so cool so and Wes was one of those people so I
really appreciate him coming on the show now wes is a consultant so if you have
this ro question that you just can’t figure out wes is that pure water cloud
and I’ll put his information on my show notes page like I said he literally wrote the book on reverse osmosis and of
course if you want that book it’s scaling up h2o comm /ro book so that’s
the link scaling up h2o doc /ro book let’s get into one question
I’ve got several questions from listeners and thank you for that I would
not have the show that I do without your questions so if you’re driving around
out there and you’re thinking hey I’ve got this question but I don’t think I’m gonna send it to Trey so I just don’t
have the time please take a second and send that question to me because those
are how I come up with the shows that I’m gonna do and it also is the answer
to this question that I’m going to read that many many many of you have written in so I want to paraphrase because a lot
of you have written in a question similar to this but it’s into the reference of the question-and-answer
episode that I did now that was episode
24 entitled the one with all the questions and if you want to listen to
that you can very easily go to scaling-up h2o comm forward slash 24 and
all the information about that but I gotta tell you that was one of my favorite shows to do because I knew I
was spot-on everything I was talking about because that came from you guys
the listeners that came from the scaling-up nation so here’s the question all these questions stem from what are
you gonna do another one and folks the only way that I can do another one of those because I get rid of like ten
questions when I do a show like that so I have to have plenty to do is I need your questions I will tell you the
reason I’m not answering more questions right now is I am planning another all
questions all you and me show or I’m talking about the things that you have
asked me about so that is coming but my question and hope for you is that if you
want that to continue to come please let me know what you want to talk about what
you have four questions folks I am so
pleased with how well the show is being received and I really enjoy doing it
it is my hope that this show is the catalyst or one of the catalysts that
allows you to be a little bit better tomorrow than you were today and folks I
hope you have a great [Music]
you [Music]
you