(533n) Remote Monitoring, Supervisory Control and Technoeconomic Evaluation of Advanced High Recovery Wellhead Water Purification and Desalination Systems

Remote monitoring, supervisory control and technoeconomic evaluation of advanced high recovery wellhead water purification and desalination systems

Increased nitrate contamination and salinity of potable well water supplies in agricultural regions throughout the United States is adversely impacting many small and disadvantaged communities. While wellhead membrane-based nitrate removal and salinity reduction is feasible, small communities lack the technical resources to operate and manage water treatment, particularly when confronted with temporal variability of water quality and community water use patterns. Thus, the deployment of water treatment systems requires advanced self-adaptive operation and remote monitoring and supervision. The goal is to reduce the cost of onsite operational and monitoring needs, relying on expert operators that are remotely located with the tools afforded via real-time cloud-computing, online and remote system monitoring, and advanced supervisory control that allows adherence to regulatory water quality and other small water system requirements. In the current work, an advanced design of a high recovery membrane-based water treatment and desalination system is introduced, focusing on local and remote monitoring requirements, self-adaptive operation and technoeconomic feasibility analysis. The study is based on operational pilot study experience with our uniquely designed high recovery reverse osmosis (RO) systems, integrated with feedwater pretreatment and product water post-processing, deployed to provide safe drinking water to a number of small, disadvantaged communities in an agricultural region in California. Through remote system monitoring and supervisory control, the concept of a “virtual water district” is introduced, whereby multiple small community water systems can be managed and operated remotely. Here we demonstrate the utility of modern advances in wireless communication, cloud-based database management, and “live” user/operator interfaces. Managing of the treatment system is facilitated via a cyberinfrastructure consisting of three major components: local system control, automated cloud-based data collection, and a web-based interface that provide real-time monitoring and historical data from each of the water systems, in addition to providing alerts and streaming regulatory data for these systems that currently provide safe drinking water to three small communities. Intermittent operation of the water systems is facilitated via a supervisory control system to enable meeting the temporally varying water use of the communities while ensuring compliance with regulatory requirements regarding water quality. Examples of system operation, and approaches to mitigate membrane fouling and mineral scaling will be discussed within the context of expanding the concept of remotely managed distributed water systems. Ina addition, techno-economic assessment was conducted to determine the water production cost for these small wellhead water treatment systems based on actual expenditures and process data over a two year operating period. Results of the present pilot study demonstrated that advanced remotely operated, distributed membrane-based water treatment systems are an economically viable solution for providing impacted disadvantaged communities with safe drinking water.