Water and Sewage Treatment: Expertise Unlimited

I've just accepted an Associate Professorship in Environmental Engineering at Nottingham University. I'll be starting there soon, but I intend to continue to provide consultancy services via Expertise Limited just as before.

I'm working this weekend, producing a boiler water treatment plant specification, and investigating the sufficiency of design capacity of a proposed package plant.

This second issue brings up the lack of standardisation of the supposed British Standard BS EN 12566-3. It doesn't mean what people think it means. It only means that the unit removed a certain percentage of pollutants for a given flow of domestic sewage under test conditions. Capability in dealing with variations in flow and load, its reaction to extended periods off-line, and many other things it would be nice to know about cannot be inferred by the granting of such a certificate.

This British version of what is intended to be a harmonised European standard is inferior to its German and even French versions. As ever, buyer beware!

Labels: boiler water treatment, BS EN 12566-3, ion exchange, package, plant, reverse osmosis, sizing