GE Water & Process Technologies recently announced that it will supply its advanced water treatment equipment to the Lake Manatee Water Treatment Plant in Florida, United States (U.S.), as they look to upgrade their facility. Presently, the facility is responsible for purifying the drinking water for more than 350,000 residents, and has the capacity to process 52 million gallons (196.8 million litres) of water per day from the existing conventional surface water treatment plant.
GE will provide the Lake Manatee Water Treatment Plant with its ZeeWeed* 1000 ultrafiltration membranes for the surface water trains, which will allow the facility to produce water quality that meets stringent U.S. Environmental Protection Agency drinking water standards. The upgrade will also enable Manatee County to continue to meet the water needs of its citizens without increasing the plant’s environmental footprint.
As its multimedia filters in the surface water treatment trains began to approach the end of their useful lives, Manatee County decided to upgrade the plant, choosing ultrafiltration technology to accomplish a retrofit within the footprint of its existing media filters.
“We continually look for ways to improve our level of service, and the value of those services, to our customers,” Mark Simpson, a water manager in Manatee County, said. “Harnessing ultrafiltration technology for this repair and replacement project will ensure we can meet current filtration requirements under the most challenging conditions experienced in Lake Manatee and positions us to meet even more stringent proposed requirements.”
With the water from the Lake Manatee reservoir, and the groundwater from the East County Well Field, the water treatment facility in Manatee County provides drinking water to the residents of Manatee County, Sarasota County, the cities of Palmetto and Bradenton, as well as the municipalities on the barrier islands.
GE will supply Manatee County with 12 membrane trains, a two-stack design to be retrofitted into the existing sand filter basins. As GE’s technology offers low life cycle costs and the project will incorporate a partial siphon design, the municipality will save on permeate pumping costs. Additionally, the plant will operate at a water recovery rate of 96.3 per cent.
“The ZeeWeed 1000 membrane consistently outperforms conventional filtration technology while meeting or exceeding regulatory requirements, regardless of source water quality,” Kevin Cassidy, global leader, engineered systems – GE Water & Process Technologies, said. “It produces superior water quality and is virtually unaffected by variable raw water quality, which makes it the ideal technology to use for the upgrade of the Lake Manatee Water Treatment Plant.”
With this upgrade, Lake Manatee will be GE’s largest converter of multimedia filtration to a membrane system in the world.
