Pharmaceutical Water Pretreatment System
Widely used across pharmaceutical, healthcare, and food industries for their strict water quality requirements.
- Turbidity: Outlet water from the multi-media filter should maintain turbidity at or below 1 NTU.
- Hardness: Water softened through the softener must have a residual hardness of no more than 1.5 mg/L.
- Residual chlorine: Activated carbon filtration should reduce free chlorine levels to below 0.1 ppm to protect downstream systems.
- Microbial load: Total microbial count should not exceed 500 cfu/mL.
- Escherichia coli: Must be completely absent; testing must confirm 0 cfu per 100 mL.
- Conductivity: Feed water supplied to the reverse osmosis unit must remain under 500 μS/cm to meet system performance requirements.
The pretreatment system's design varies based on the quality of the incoming water, but generally includes a raw water storage tank, a multi-media filter to reduce turbidity and suspended solids, an activated carbon filter for chlorine and organic compound removal, and either a water softener or an antiscalant dosing system to manage hardness and scale prevention. A final security filter is also integrated to ensure protection of downstream purification units.
- Inlet valve delay control: The slow-opening valve reduces water hammer effects and prevents damage to internal components
- Level monitoring: Equipped with 4–5 stage liquid level sensors for accurate, multi-level coordination
- Tank capacity design: Balances adequate buffer volume while maximizing the recovery of incoming water from other sources
- Dosing system: Sodium hypochlorite (NaClO) dosing helps effectively control microbial growth
- Media options: Available with quartz sand, garnet sand, activated carbon, and smokeless anthracite, depending on process needs
- Layered filtration: Media with different particle sizes are arranged in layers for efficient separation
- Effluent quality: Residual chlorine ﹤0.1 ppm; SDI (Silt Density Index) ﹤3
- Air-water backwash: Compressed air (~2 bar) used to enhance cleaning efficiency
- Internal distributor design: Dual distributors to handle high flow rates evenly
- Valve configuration: Pneumatic butterfly valves are preferred for smooth, automated control
- Working principle: Uses cation exchange resin to remove calcium (Ca²⁺) and magnesium (Mg²⁺) ions
- Media configuration: Quartz sand combined with cation exchange resin
- Regeneration mode: Can operate in co-current or counter-current regeneration
- Control system: Available with automatic controllers or valve-based control
- Effluent quality: Water hardness is reduced to ﹤1.5 ppm
- Valve selection: Pneumatic butterfly valves are the preferred choice for smooth operation
Note: Each pharmaceutical water system is custom-designed to meet the user requirement specification (URS) provided by the client. All photos and videos featured are from actual WEMAC projects.
The entire softening process, running, backwashing, brine absorption, regeneration, and rinsing, is fully automated for smoother operation. As for the pumps, both the raw water pump and the two-stage high-pressure pumps are frequency-controlled. This setup adjusts the pressure as needed during operation, and when the pretreatment system is on standby, it runs a low-speed internal circulation to reduce the risk of microbial growth and avoid unnecessary energy use.
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