Power Plant Water Treatment

Yes, for the scaling and biofouling load — though how much dosing comes off depends on the water and the circuit. HydroFLOW® clamps around the outside of the cooling-water pipe and induces a patented ~150 kHz electronic signal into the water. The signal makes dissolved calcium and magnesium crystallise in suspension, carried harmlessly through the circuit, rather than bonding to condenser tubes and cooling tower fill as hard scale. Nothing is added to the water and no plumbing changes are needed. Some sites stop antiscalant dosing entirely: at a China power plant, dosing on the steam-condenser circuit stopped one week after installation, and at Imperial Oil's Kearl Lake facility in Canada antiscalant went from 2.0 ppm to 0.0 ppm over a twelve-month monitored trial. Others reduce it rather than remove it — a Texas factory cut total chemical use by 75%. Corrosion inhibition, pH control and any statutory disinfection chemistry are separate duties and should be maintained as your water treatment regime requires.

Biofouling in a seawater circuit starts with a biofilm that lets mussels, barnacles and other marine growth settle on the wetted surfaces of intakes, screens, condenser tubes and pipework. Conventional control means shock chlorination or mechanical cleaning. HydroFLOW®'s electronic signal disrupts the conditions that biofilm and shellfish need to attach and grow, so it works alongside scale control on the same circuit and from the same installation points. The clearest evidence is a side-by-side trial at a desalination plant in Chile: one seawater suction line was treated and a second left untreated as a control, and across 223 days and four inspections the treated line held zero mussels and needed no cleaning and no chemicals, while the control line grew mussels over 3 cm. At an LNG plant in China, bacteria in the seawater cooling circuit fell by 97% with an estimated $56k saved. Biofouling control should always be verified against your site's own monitoring and any statutory requirements.

Most cooling water chemistry is designed for a recirculating tower, where dosing is added to a fixed inventory of water. A once-through or seawater circuit has no inventory to dose — the water passes through the condenser once and returns to the sea or river — so chemical programmes are expensive, environmentally constrained and often limited to intermittent shock treatment. Because HydroFLOW® conditions the water physically as it passes through the field, it does not depend on residence time or on holding a chemical residual, which suits it to once-through, seawater and river-water cooling as well as to cooling tower circuits. In a controlled trial at a desalination plant in Chile, a treated seawater suction line ran 223 days with no cleaning and no chemicals and no mussels, while the untreated control line fouled. See sea water cooling systems for the detail.

A typical power plant cooling programme runs four chemistries: antiscalants and dispersants to hold hardness in solution, acid for pH control, corrosion inhibitors to protect the metallurgy, and oxidising or non-oxidising biocides for microbiological control. HydroFLOW® acts on the first and, where biofilm is the driver, on part of the fourth — and how much comes off depends on the site.

On the scale side, some circuits stop antiscalant dosing altogether — at a China power plant, dosing on the steam-condenser circuit stopped one week after installation, and at Imperial Oil’s Kearl Lake facility in Canada antiscalant went from 2.0 ppm to 0.0 ppm across a 200,000 m³/day heat exchanger system over a twelve-month monitored trial. Others reduce rather than remove: a Texas factory cut total chemical use by 75% across its cooling and washer systems.

On the biofouling side, the same signal disrupts the conditions biofilm needs to establish, which for most sites means less shock chlorination and lower routine biocide dosing rather than none — at a China LNG plant, bacteria in the seawater cooling circuit fell 97%, with an estimated $56k saved.

It does not replace corrosion inhibition, pH control, or any disinfection chemistry you are required to maintain by regulation — those stay. What changes is the scale-related share of your chemical spend, and part of the biocide load where biofilm is the problem, along with the storage, handling and discharge that comes with it.

Water moves through four stages in a thermal power plant. Raw water is taken in and pre-treated, then demineralised — usually through reverse osmosis and ion exchange — to make ultra-pure make-up. That make-up feeds the boiler and steam cycle, where it is turned to steam, drives the turbine and is condensed back. A separate and far larger cooling circuit carries waste heat from the condenser to a cooling tower, a river or the sea. What is not recycled leaves as cooling tower blowdown and plant effluent.

HydroFLOW® is used on the cooling circuit, which is the main application, and on the reverse osmosis and demineralisation trains that produce the plant’s make-up. It is not used on the boiler and steam loop itself: that water is demineralised and should not form scale under normal operation. HydroFLOW® does not remove dissolved solids and is no substitute for demineralisation or effluent treatment.

Yes. At Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, two HydroFLOW® Industrial units were fitted to 108 mm cooling water supply pipes upstream of the distillate coolers — balance-of-plant cooling duty, not safety-related systems. Between December 2019 and March 2020 the carbonate content of hard deposits fell by 63.9%, hard calcite up to 12 mm thick became brittle and removable, biological fouling was cleared during the trial, and no new deposits formed on the control beacons. At an LNG plant in China, bacteria in the seawater cooling circuit fell by 97%. Results at both sites were verified by third-party facilities managers and technical staff. Anything serving safety-related cooling would need to go through your own site qualification and regulatory approval first.

Yes. HydroFLOW® fits on the outside of the pipe, so there is no cutting into the line, no welding and no need to drain or derate the unit. At a China power plant, two Multihead 72-inch units were fitted to an 1,800 mm steam-condenser cooling line with no shutdown, and at Imperial Oil's Kearl Lake facility in Canada three Custom 24-inch units went onto heat exchanger inlet pipes on a system flowing around 200,000 m³/day. It suits steel, concrete-lined and plastic pipework, and because the signal propagates in both directions along the water, a small number of correctly sized installation points can protect the whole circuit.