Cooling Tower (CT) Water systems are widely used in industrial and commercial sectors to cool processes and HVAC systems. CT system cooling water must be treated to avoid scaling, corrosion and bio-contamination that cause high economic losses. Traditional water treatments, chemical additives and water blowdowns, are becoming obsolete. Chemical additives are hazardous and banned by increasingly stringent regulations. Blowdowns are unaffordable since water is becoming a precious resource. New technologies are needed to perform water treatment in an affordable and clean way.
Recently, electrochemical softening has appeared as a non-expensive and clean alternative. However, its widespread use is being ballasted by the lack of reliable monitoring systems, which optimizes the energy supplied to prevent corrosion. I-SOFT is a ground-breaking approach to on-line monitor the scaling events in the CT system with an innovative feedback control that regulates the power supply output, providing a full and highly accurate removal of scale and bio-fouling without promoting corrosion.
To take this innovation to the market, from February 1st until May 31th, 2019, UET carried out an extensive feasibility study for their innovative and intelligent electrochemical cooling water softening system. The objective was to address the feasibility of technical activities to ensure I-SOFT validation on different pilot trials, and enforce commercialization and exploitation strategy of the project by means of a FTO Analysis, a detail business plan and a financial feasibility assessment.
