Adelaide SWRO

General Information

• Project: Adelaide Desalination Plant
• Client: SA Water
• Location: Port Stanvac, Adelaide, South Australia, Australia
• Capacity: 300,000 m3/day
• Design and Construct: ACCIONA Agua designed and constructed the plant facility in joint venture with Abby Group and McConnell Dowell
• Operations: AdelaideAqua, a company owned equally by ACCIONA & Trility now Operate and Maintain the facility for 20 years.

Key points

Intake

• The sea water intake is composed of a 1.5 km tunnel
• Sodium hypochlorite and sulphuric acid can be closed in the intake minimise biofuiling and to maintain tunnel conditions
• The sea water from the intake is pumped up to a height of 57m using 12 dry chamber pumps with a total capacity of 28,400 m3/h

Pre-treatment

• Solids filtration systems using 24 racks of disc filters
• Ability to add coagulant agents, active carbon and sulphuric acid
• Pretreatment using 28 ultrafiltration submerged membrane cells
• Safety filtration using 20 filter cartridges prior to the RO
• Ability to add antiscalant agent to avoid salt precipitation in the system
• Ability to add sodium metabisulphite to neutralise the oxidising agent added in the intake
• 12 high pressure pumps

Reverse Osmosis

• Energy recovery system using ERI pressure exchangers
• Energy recovery from the saline concentrate output, prior to discharge, using turbines which produce energy using the hydraulic jump between the level of the plant and the sea water
• 20 first pass trains and 20+10 second pass trains which have been technically developed by ACCIONA
• First train production capacity of 15,000m3/day, each made up of 180 pressure vessels, and in each one, 8 reverse osmosis membranes
• Total recovery rate of 48%
• Low energy consumption

Post Treatment

• Remineralisation using lime and CO2
• Disinfection using chlorine and treatment using hydrofluorsilicic acid
• 2 treated water tanks each with a capacity of 25,000m3

Effluent treatment

• Advanced treatment of the pre-treatment wash water
• Neutralization of the membrane cleaning solutions