Customising water quality to improve performance at Kings Lynn F&B manufacturing site

A leading manufacturer of some of the nation’s favourite convenience foods sought to install a water treatment plant to remove the hardness of the incoming town’s water to help them improve operational performance at the same time as renewing the utilities serving the factory.

Alpheus designed and implemented a solution that combined packaged units into a bespoke design to meet the client’s exact requirements cost-effectively, and importantly ensuring provision for easy operation and a duty assist arrangement for the continuous operation of crucial processes.

Goals

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The client required a reliable and consistent supply of treated water based on specific quantity and quality parameters to four key areas of the factory:

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• Boiler water feed

• Retort vessels (via steam condensate)

• Cooling towers

• Potable cold and hot water services for product and cleaning

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The goals of the installation were to:

• Optimise efficiency and performance of factory operations, and prevent performance issues caused by the hardness of the incoming water supply.

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• Prevent downtime on site by ensuring critical processes could continue in the event of a failure within the water treatment system which would ensure treated water still reached critical users.

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• Ensure provision of easy access and allow for future expansion within a compact footprint.

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Alpheus was awarded the contract based on technical expertise, financials and the ability to work to a tight timescale.

Two reverse osmosis units at water treatment facility

Services Provided

Alpheus created a tailored design that seamlessly integrated standard packaged units to create a bespoke solution to meet their specific parameters for water quality, easy management and the provision to allow for future expansion.

The installed treatment process consisted of:

• A raw water feed tank.

• Feed pumps.

• Three Water Softeners.

• Two duty/assist Reverse Osmosis (RO) Units, incorporating ancillary equipment such as a bulk salt saturator.

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The plant was designed with a duty assist arrangement where two Reverse Osmosis (RO) systems provided the required demand. In the event of failure of a single RO unit demand would be prioritised for critical users while water would be sourced directly from the town’s water supply until full capacity of the RO treatment is returned.

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Alpheus procured the softeners and RO units from the water treatment specialist Lubron UK Ltd who supply high-quality water treatment products.

With over 30 years’ experience in the design, build and operation of plants across a wide range of sectors, Alpheus was easily able to address the unique challenges of the project during its implementation:

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• To meet the budget and ensure rapid delivery of the project, whilst achieving the goal of a simplified control system, local control panels for individual packages such as feed pumps and the RO skids were linked to a master control interface to allow for simplified control of the whole system (without the need to source and create an entirely bespoke control panel).

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• Integrating the new water treatment plant into existing, closely related site infrastructure through close coordination with the site and a thorough understanding of the existing systems.

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• Temporary measures had to be improvised during testing and commissioning when the existing receiving water tank in the factory was not yet ready to receive water, where the treated water was allowed to run to drain until the water tank in the factory was ready to receive the treated water.

Customising water quality to improve performance at Kings Lynn F&B manufacturing site

Alpheus Delivered

Alpheus Delivered

Goals

The goals of the installation were to:

Services Provided

The Outcome

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