Potable Water Iron Filtration System

South Orange County, CA

PACE designed, constructed, and commissioned a new 1,000-gallon-per-minute (gpm) iron and manganese water filtration system for a confidential client at their booster pump station. The system was designed to improve reliability and operational flexibility, allowing them to supply drinking water needs from any of their groundwater wells, including wells with elevated levels of these contaminants. The treatment system consists of automatic inlet pressure regulation, chlorine pre-oxidation injection, four parallel manganese dioxide filter banks, and a semi-automated treatment bypass that allows blending of low iron content well water with treated water, increasing the total capacity of the system to 1,500 gpm.

Additionally, PACE’s internal Instrumentation & Controls (I&C) group provided full monitoring and automation of the system, which included flow and pressure metering, automatic backwash controls with online turbidity metering to minimize backwash volumes, and an innovative effluent iron concentration monitoring system, which uses a low-range turbidity meter as a surrogate for continuous iron concentration measurements. The system was performance-tested at its maximum design flow rate with influent total iron concentrations as high as 15 milligrams per liter (mg/L) and consistently produced effluent with less than 0.2 mg/L.

Key Features:

• Automatic inlet pressure regulation
• Four parallel manganese dioxide filter banks
• Treatment bypass to blend low iron content well water with treated water to increase the total capacity
• Automatic backwash controls
• Local and remote operation
• Instrumentation and controls
• Pre-filtration to increase filter performance