Improving hydraulic performance of the Kerbellec plant (FR)

Eau du Morbihan is a public water utility, responsible since January 1st, 2012, for drinking water for 196 municipalities. The drinking water supply of the 400,000 inhabitants is provided by 48 drinking water production units: 13 using surface water and 35 using underground water.

Even if the public organisation does not operate these production units, it is directly interested in innovation related to water treatment to improve the operation of its plants from both an energy and hydraulic point of view.

Thus, the public organisation wanted to study the benefits it could obtain by replacing the sand with Filtralite on the filters of the Kerbellec unit.

Filtralite® filter media delivers longer runs

While maintaining very good quality results, water losses were drastically diminished with a Filtralite solution.

This small production unit (450,000 m³/year - 100 m³/h) is supplied by the Blavet river, and has two granular filters of approximately 10 m² each. In one of the two filters, the sand (effective size 0.95) was replaced by Filtralite Pure NC 0,8-1,6, with a depth of 0.7 m to allow a comparison of the performances between the two filter media.

After several months of operation, the study confirmed that the two filters gave comparable results in terms of suspended solids and metals (Aluminum, Iron and Manganese) removal, with an increase in run lengths of 150 % with the Filtralite solution, which allows a return on investment of less than 3 years for a plant fully equipped with Filtralite and above all an improvement in the hydraulic performance of the plant by 3 points.

In 2020, Filtralite Pure NC 0,8-1,6 was installed on the entire Kerbellec site.