Designing for 24/7 Operations

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Water treatment and process separation systems are a critical part of industrial infrastructure, helping facilities to comply with regulatory limits, achieve consistent product quality, and maintain safe working conditions. While dependable performance is always desirable for water treatment systems, it is downright critical for industries that operate around the clock. For these plants, even short spans of downtime can lead to severe consequences, including delays in production schedules, damage to downstream equipment, compliance violations, and reputational harm.

To sustain 24/7 operations, reliability must be seen as a strategic business requirement—one that should be considered from the earliest planning and design phases. Prioritizing reliability at the very start of a project helps to inform design choices for optimal performance long after the system is placed into service. Here, we’ll look at key opportunities for building reliability into a water treatment solution design, with a specific eye towards redundancy, automation, and maintenance.

Reliability as a design strategy

For facilities with round-the-clock operations, it’s crucial to design for reliability from the ground up. “When designing industrial water treatment systems, reliability must be a priority, not an afterthought,” says SAMCO VP Nathan Bach, “Building in adequate redundancy and maintaining a well-planned inventory of critical spare parts are essential to minimizing operational risk. The incremental investment in reliability is often a fraction of the cost of a single unplanned production shutdown.” Budgeting plenty of time during the planning phases of the project will often pay off by yielding a more reliable water treatment solution.

Successful projects begin with defining operational requirements and risks, then selecting appropriate treatment technologies based on those specifications. To ensure dependable operation, the design process should begin by analyzing performance specifications. The project team should document required flow rates, capacity, water quality specifications, acceptable downtime, and other performance criteria, not only under normal operating conditions, but also at times of peak demand or seasonal fluctuation. The design team should also conduct risk assessments to identify critical system components, and anticipate how points of failure could affect operations.

Once operational needs are fully understood, the design process can proceed in considering the most appropriate treatment technologies for the application at hand. To do so, solution designers will need to weigh performance for a given separation function against factors like energy efficiency, serviceability, and compatibility with other process equipment at the site. The most reliable systems balance these factors to meet actual operating demands and manage foreseeable risks, often by incorporating redundancy, automation, and ongoing maintenance considerations into the design.  

Redundancy

True system dependability means consistent, round-the-clock performance even when components fail or conditions unexpectedly change. To ensure uninterrupted performance, water treatment systems are typically designed with some level of redundancy. Conceptually, redundant design means the practice of incorporating additional equipment that can pick up the operating load if or when a primary component fails. Secondary pumps, backup power, and emergency control systems are all examples of redundant system components.

Redundancy is an excellent strategy for minimizing maintenance-related downtime, provided that a few common oversights are considered during the design process. Firstly, it’s important to consider redundancy across the entire treatment process. Having backups for failure-prone equipment is just part of the solution; a well-designed redundancy strategy should also ensure that backup equipment can be brought online quickly and work seamlessly with other system components. Secondly, an effective system design should ensure that any non-functioning components can be safely isolated or bypassed with as little interruption as possible.

Finally, it’s important to understand parallel system configurations and how they relate to redundancy. By definition, parallel water treatment systems refer to a configuration where two or more duplicate units run side-by-side in simultaneous operation. Often, the primary goal of a parallel system design is to increase overall capacity or manage pressure drop in high-volume water treatment systems. Thus, while a parallel system may have duplicate components, those components may not necessarily be able to take up the additional load if a parallel unit fails. If implemented as part of a redundancy strategy, parallel units must be specifically designed with adequate capacity so they can operate independently if needed, and they must also have appropriate bypass mechanisms to isolate any non-functioning branches or units.

Automation and monitoring

Automation is an important aspect of 24/7 reliability. Automated system components deliver round-the-clock monitoring and data collection, respond instantaneously to changing conditions, and alert operators when human intervention is needed. These functions all help to reduce risks related to preventable downtime and emergency repairs by helping operators stay on top of routine maintenance and identify problems before they become major disruptions.

For water treatment systems, automated monitoring of certain parameters is crucial, not only for preventing operational disruptions, but also for improving asset performance in the long term. Modern systems will typically incorporate sensors and other devices to monitor flow, pressure, conductivity, turbidity, chemical dosing, or other application-specific water-quality or system performance indicators. Data from these devices is collected by programmable logic controllers (PLCs), which execute logic to instantly control physical components like valves and pumps. Sitting above PLCs are another layer of technology called supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems, which use computing hardware and software to monitor and control plant operations at a high level. SCADA systems collect data from PLCs and other field devices and process it to produce useful data visualizations and trend analyses. Collectively, these automation and real-time monitoring devices not only give operators insights into operational performance, but they also automate key risk reduction maneuvers when appropriate, like automated changeover to standby equipment or controlled shutdown sequences. System designs that incorporate automated components improve reliability by providing accurate information, actionable alerts, and predictable responses to abnormal conditions. In so doing, these types of automated devices can reduce response time if an issue arises, helping to prevent damage to downstream equipment or contamination of products or waste streams.

Preventative maintenance

In order to support 24/7 operations, water treatment systems must be durable, of course, but they also need to be easy to service. Preventative maintenance needs should be considered from the very earliest phases of the design process to ensure that recommended inspection, cleaning, and service activities can be executed with minimal interruption to operations. To simplify lifecycle asset management for the delivered system, consider adopting the following design best practices:

  • Prioritize accessibility. Solution designers should consider the maintenance regimen for each component in order to prioritize accessibility in equipment layouts. For example, if a certain pre-filter is expected to need frequent replacement, it makes sense to locate that component so that operators can quickly and easily change out the filter when needed.
  • Use modular components. Modular systems offer built-in redundancy—if one module needs maintenance or repair, the remainder of the system can stay operational. While not always feasible, modular designs can be an excellent solution for facilities that have low tolerance for downtime.  
  • Use standardized parts. It’s inevitable that components will need to be repaired or replaced, especially when in constant use. Prioritizing the use of standard parts and sizes wherever possible in a system design means that sourcing replacements will be faster and easier, and often lower in cost than custom parts. During startup, it can also be helpful to establish spare parts inventories for high-risk components, including pumps, seals, valves, sensors, membranes, and control-system components as applicable.
  • Incorporate strategic isolation or bypass points. Valve placement and other design configuration choices are crucial for controlling the flow of water to permit service or repair of one piece of equipment without taking an entire system offline.

Considering these principles ensures that the water treatment system will be easier to maintain, which can in turn improve asset performance and support predictable operations.

Conclusion

When water treatment systems are designed for reliability from the outset, industrial facilities can move beyond the costs and headaches of responding to failures, and can instead achieve consistent, round-the-clock performance.  By considering a few common oversights and solution design strategies to overcome them, project teams can build systems that deliver long-term value by preventing avoidable downtime, mitigating disruptions when a problem arises, and maximizing the service life of assets.   

If you’re looking to build a new water treatment system from the ground up, upgrade existing equipment, or meet a temporary reliability challenge, SAMCO can help. Contact us today to discuss your needs with one of our engineers, or visit our website to request a quote.  Our team of experts has over 40 years of experience in the design and delivery of high-reliability water treatment systems, wastewater treatment solutions, and process separation systems for dependable 24/7 performance. Our service offerings include: 

To learn more about our innovative solutions, check out our project archive for examples of past projects. 

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