B
Blowdown Water
Aamer Ali
Department of Chemical Engineering and
Materials, University of Calabria, Rende (CS),
Italy
Operational principle of steam and water boilers,
cooling towers, evaporative coolers, and evapo-
rative condensers is based upon the evaporation
of water. Dehydration from these equipment
leaves behind a solution enriched with nonvola-
tile substances mainly including salts of calcium,
magnesium, sodium, and silica, requiring the dis-
charge of contaminant-rich water. The drained
volume of water in order to maintain an accept-
able level of impurities in the evaporation equip-
ment is known as blowdown water or bleed water
or simply blowdown. In addition to the salts,
blowdown water can also contain bacteria,
algae, and pathogens. Increased concentration of
minerals and other impurities is undesirable for
several applications. For example, in steam
boiler, the evaporation of pure water can lead
toward the scale formation, water carryover
with steam, and blockage of the piping system,
while in case of cooling tower, concentrated
blowdowns cause scaling and corrosion problems
even in downstream equipment. The concentra-
tion of salts and other solid species in blowdown
water is much higher than the original feedwater
introduced.
# Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
E. Drioli, L. Giorno (eds.), Encyclopedia of Membranes,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-642-40872-4_2183-1
In boiler, the blowdown water is discharged
from the surface and bottom to get rid of floating
and settled impurities, respectively. On one side,
less amount of blowdown water may cause the
scale formation, water carryover, local heating
leading toward the failure of boiler tubes, and
less heat exchange rate, while the excessive dis-
charge of blowdown water leads toward
increased water usage, loss of energy associated
with the discarded steam, large amount of
makeup water, and excessive use of chemicals.
Therefore, the quantity of blowdown water must
be optimized.
Scarceness of freshwater, stringent environ-
ment regulations, and cost reduction are the driv-
ing forces for treatment of blowdown water.
State-of-the-art treatment techniques for cooling
tower blowdown water include lime-soda soften-
ing and thermal evaporation. The former removes
hardness but involves the use of chemicals and
produces sludge. Thermal evaporation, on the
other hand, is highly energy intensive. Due to
environmental concern, the concept of zero liquid
discharge for treatment of blowdown water has
gained popularity recently. The main tools to
achieve zero liquid discharge under consideration
include membrane filtration, electrodialysis, and
evaporation.
In boilers, chemical pretreatment is applied to
reduce the scaling problem and to enhance the
heat transfer rate. These chemicals along with the
other contaminates present into the boiler
feedwater form sludge that settles down at the
2 Blowdown Water
bottom of the boiler. Consequently, the blow-
down becomes richer in impurities. Alternative
membrane-based pretreatment can be applied to
tackle these problems. For example, ultrafiltra-
tion has been used to affectively remove colloidal
silica from the feedwater that imparts a vigorous
effect in controlling the boiler blowdown (Kochi
membrane systems, Inc. 2004). A more refined
membrane process such as nanofiltration or
reverse osmosis can further improve the
consequence.
As far as the posttreatment of boiler blow-
down is concerned, there have not been signifi-
cant efforts devoted, probably due to high
concentration and very complex nature of the
waste stream. However, advanced membrane
operations, especially membrane distillation,
can be appropriate candidate due to high temper-
ature and concentration of the stream and less
fouling tendency of the MD process
(Yu et al. 2013). In case of cooling tower, where
the objective is to recover water with quality
equal or higher than that of makeup water, vari-
ous membrane operations have been tested.
Nanofiltration and reverse osmosis have shown
the capability to treat the water to required purity
level but usually require a pretreatment step. On
the other hand, forward osmosis and membrane
distillation have shown more interesting results in
terms of less severe pretreatment requirements,
operational stability, and less fouling problems.
References
Kochi Membrane Systems, Inc. (2014) Case study: ultra-
filtration reduces boiler blowdown at India’s largestpa-
perboard mill, available online at: http://www.
kochmembrane.com/PDFs/Case-Studies/KMS_ITC_
Case_Study.aspx
Yu X, Yang H, Lei H, Shapiro A (2013) Experimental
evaluation on concentrating cooling tower blowdown
water by direct contact membrane distillation. Desali-
nation 323:134–141. doi:10.1016/j.desal.2013.01.029