Project WEISS - Efficient cooling water cycle management by integrated desalination

Together with six other partners, including reputed companies and research institutes, SMS group participates as plant manufacturer in the project “Efficient cooling water cycle management by integrated desalination using the steel industry as an example”, or WEISS for short.

Since a steelworks in many ways depends on the reliable supply of suitable water for cooling (directly or indirectly, product or components), cleaning (descaling) and as solvent (surface finishing), the minimization of fresh water demand is an issue of crucial and, in times of global warming, growing importance to plant operators. In some countries, the discharge of waste water has become more difficult due to tighter legislation. For these reasons, water saving concepts are essential to many plant operators and to some thereof even a matter of existence.

The target is to reduce the volume of blowdown water to the achievable minimum to tape the full fresh water saving potential. The selected approach comprises the measures below:

• Softening of feed water in the conditioning section.
• Demand-based dosing of flocculants/flocculation aids by solids concentration monitoring.
• Demand-based dosing and adaptation of cooling water chemicals to water treatment.
• Development of a process for blowdown water salt separation by means of reverse osmosis (RO)/capacitive deionization (CD)/thin-film evaporation.

In trial containers SMS group staff merges own test equipment with that of its project partners and takes responsibility for the joint pilot tests with the original blow-down water of our project partner "Deutsche Edelstahlwerke". The test results are transferred to other applications respectively customers by material flow simulation. SMS group prepares process concepts and analyzes their economical efficiency in terms of investment and operating costs.

After completion of the trials, the test containers will be available for pilot trials at other customers who use cooling circuits, too. SMS group will be able to offer the developed desalination process by the end of the project activities in September 2019 at the latest. After completion of the trials, the test containers will be available for pilot trials at other customers who use cooling circuits, too. The process is planned to be available by the end of the activities in September 2019.