The New York City Department of Environmental Protection is in the preliminary design
stage of a new 7 to 9 million gallon per day (MGD) drinking water plant. This plant will
be located in the borough of Queens and will utilize groundwater from the Upper Glacial
Aquifer (approximately 80-foot deep aquifer) as its sourcewater. The water has high
levels of iron (Total: 1 to 15 mg/l), manganese (1 to 1.5 mg/l), tetrachloroethene (PCE - 5
to 160 ug/l), MTBE (1 to 140 ug/l), and hardness (150 to 600 mg/l as CaCO3). The
proposed full-scale treatment train for this plant includes pH adjustment, iron/manganese
oxidation, membrane filtration, membrane softening, two-stage air stripping, and final
chemical conditioning.
As only the groundwater wells but no treatment plant currently exists on the site, a 100-
gpm pilot plant was constructed within an empty storage building. The pilot plant
process train includes parallel trains of pH adjustment via induced draft tray aerator or
caustic soda addition, parallel trains of iron and manganese oxidation by potassium
permanganate or ozone, parallel trains of microfiltration (MF) and ultrafiltration (UF)
skids (Ionics, Pall, & Zenon are manufacturers), and membrane softening (one Osmonics
skid will alternately test Koch nanofiltration (NF) and Osmonics low-pressure reverse
osmosis (RO) membranes).
Once a suitable pH-oxidation strategy was conceived and run through the MF/UF filters,
the NF and RO membranes were put to the test to remove hardness and VOCs. One of
the stated goals of the pilot plant was to evaluate the effectiveness of NF and RO
membranes to remove hardness and VOCs from the groundwater. Two NF/RO
membranes were alternately tested: Koch's NF and Osmonics' low-pressure RO
membranes, each for a continuous period of at least three weeks.
New York City's upstate water supply (Catskill-Delaware systems) satisfies more than
90% of the City's drinking water needs. This sourcewater is relatively soft (average
hardness of 22 mg/l as CaCO3); therefore, the City desired that groundwater from this new
plant would closely resemble the water which the end users currently received. With
high hardness levels present in the Upper Glacial Aquifer, the NF and RO membranes
were tasked with this responsibility.
In addition to hardness removal, it was also hoped that the NF and RO membranes could
remove some of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) present in the groundwater. The
NF and RO membranes' ability to remove VOCs such as MTBE, PCE, and TCE is
important in evaluating design objectives for a full-scale facility. Includes tables, figures.