Va Tech Wabag Bags Rs 1,033 cr Order for Desalination Project

VA Tech Wabag has been awarded the contract for execution of the country’s largest sea water desalination project by Chennai Metropolitan Water Supply and Sewerage Board (Chennai Metro Water.

The DBO-based (design, build and operate) plant, with a capacity of 100 million litres a day (MLD), is to come up on 40 acres at Nemmeli, near Chennai, at a cost of Rs 1,033 crore. The plant is expected to be commissioned in the next 24 months.

The construction cost for the reverse osmosis (RO) technology-based project works out to Rs 533 crore, which would be funded by a grant from the Centre. The scope of the project includes a seven-year-contract for operations and maintenance that is estimated to cost an additional Rs 500 crore. From the state side, Chennai Metro would be allocating the fund for the O&M contract.

The plant, being undertaken along with IDE Technologies of Israel, would convert sea water into fresh potable water, which would be supplied to the southern suburbs of Chennai. This includes the entire stretch of the IT corridor, Thiruvanmiyur, Pallipattu, Velachery, MRC Nagar and Kelambakkam.

Based on the scope of the project, IDE and VA Tech Wabag would be involved in a 30:70 joint venture.

The construction work is expected to start within a month’s time. Though VA Tech Wabag has capability to use multi-effect distillation, mechanical vapour compression, thermal vapour compression and multi-stage flash technologies, it found the RO system suitable for the Nemmeli plant. From the present water supply of 650 MLD @ 100 LPCD, the desalination plant would help to improve the per capita consumption to 140 LPCD.

Leveraging its partnership with Chennai Metrowater, VA Tech Wabag is claimed to be supplying 30% of the city’s drinking water and treating 50% of the city’s sewage.

Dresser Roots Helps to Meet Urgent Need for Clean Drinking Water in Rural Egyptian Villages

HOUSTON –ROOTS™ blowers, manufactured by Dresser, Inc., a leader in providing highly engineered products for global infrastructure projects, have been specified for a project that is making potable water available to villages in Upper Egypt where it is desperately needed.

The project deploys portable, turnkey water treatment plants to rural villages to purify local water and prevent outbreaks of waterborne illnesses. Typically these plants produce 100 m3 (approximately 26,500 gallons) of clean water per hour.

The Dresser Roots Egyptian distributor, Tartoussieh Engineering of Cairo, supplied 249 of the small ROOTS Universal RAI® blower packages to the three contractors – Veolia, Pharoahs Engineering and Aircraft Factory Helwan – who were selected to provide the water treatment plants. ROOTS blowers were chosen for the project because of their rugged construction and flexible configuration to meet a wide variety of installation specifications.

“ROOTS blowers are very durable and dependable, which makes them ideal for a project when around-the-clock effort is required to supply people with a basic necessity such as clean water,” said Mohyi Tartoussieh, sales manager for Tartoussieh Engineering.

Supplying clean water to its citizenry is a high priority and an ongoing challenge for the Egyptian government. The Nile River provides an estimated 97 percent of the renewable water resources in Egypt. Yet it is subject to pollution by run-off from industrial waste and sewage, the latter because sanitary sewage treatment capacity has not kept pace with the country’s population growth. Conventional water purification processes have sometimes proved inadequate when chlorination treatment has interacted with some of the pollutants and created additional health hazards.

The portable water treatment plants are part of a larger, E£1.3 billion (US $240 million) initiative by the Egyptian government, with support from the Arab Fund for Economic and Social Development and the National Organization for Potable Water & Sanitary Drainage. The goal of this environmental initiative is to provide safe drinking water and expand the capacity of the country’s sanitary sewage treatment infrastructure.

MWH Soft Technology to Assist City of Los Angeles in Efforts to Save Billions of Gallons of Water Annually

MWH Soft, a leading global innovator of wet infrastructure modeling and simulation software and technologies, has announced that the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP) Recycled Water Division has chosen MWH Soft’s industry-leading InfoWater Suite software as its advanced water network modeling solution. The suite enhances the enterprise’s comprehensive ArcGIS-centric (ESRI, Redlands, CA) strategy for managing its water distribution system. The selection further substantiates MWH Soft’s continued dominance of the geospatial hydraulic infrastructure modeling and management market.

The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power was established more than 100 years ago to provide a reliable and safe water and electricity to City residents and businesses. In May 2008, LADWP officials unveiled the City of Los Angeles Water Supply Action Plan, “Securing L.A.’s Water Supply,” which pledged to meet all new demand for water – about 100,000 acre-feet per year (123 million m3/yr) by 2030 – through water conservation and recycling rather than by importing of additional water. Since then, the City’s total use of recycled water is up to 7,200 acre-feet per year (8.9 million m3/yr). The water is used for irrigation and industrial purposes, and for environmental uses, including serving as a barrier to seawater intrusion.

All recycled wastewater in Los Angeles undergoes treatment and disinfection to the tertiary level and meets stringent water quality standards set by the California State Department of Public Health. The treated water travels to the end user through a network of pipes that are painted purple to differentiate them from those that carry potable water.

“LADWP’s use of our software to help manage its recycled water system sends a message that our products are not only powerful and easy-to-implement, but help drive sustainability in our industry,” said MWH Soft Vice President-Director of Americas Operations J. Erick Heath, P.E. “Our products are known for delivering consistent, high quality engineering GIS modeling data; enhanced efficiency; and reliable, cost-effective planning options. These powerful advantages are sparking measurable improvements in productivity, system performance, return on investment, and customer satisfaction around the world.”

Built atop ArcGIS using the latest Microsoft.NET and ESRI ArcObjects component technologies, InfoWater seamlessly integrates advanced water network modeling and optimization functionality with the latest generation of ArcGIS. It not only addresses all the operations of a typical water distribution system, but allows engineers to accurately perform the most difficult hydraulic analyses – including multi-point and extended period fire flow simulations, variable speed pumps, and advanced water quality calculations – and showcase the results using the rich presentations tools native to the ArcGIS environment.

The software delivers world-record performance, scalability, reliability, functionality and flexibility directly within the GIS setting, completely eliminating the need for inefficient, unreliable data synchronization, synching schemes, or middlelink interfaces required by other software. These factors and more translate to increased productivity, reduced costs, greater efficiency, and improved designs.