Coatex, Genay - France

With over 30 year experience, Coatex is one of the world's leading producers of rheological additives for aqueous formulations.

These high performance additives are used all around the world in a wide variety of applications, including mineral processing, paper, paints and other industrial specialties.

COATEX had a demineralized water production station using ion exchange resin technology. COATEX uses demineralized water for the manufacture of its chemicals, as well as for the rinsing of its machines.

The unit in place being old and requiring the use of chemical reagents, COATEX wished to replace it with a reverse osmosis installation working with downstream mixed bed ion exchange for polishing.

The reverse osmosis installation provided by Veolia Water STI, subsidiary of Veolia Water Solutions & Technologies, specialist in industrial wastewater treatment, is a combination of standard equipment, including the supply of sequestering agents, in order to achieve the water quality and quantity required by the company COATEX.

Veolia Water STI's offer had the following advantages :

• Local support staffand after-sale service
• Competitive prices for standardized solution
• No reagent use for the mixed bed regeneration
• Supply of the chemicals (sequestering agents)
• Local follow-up of the project

Solutions and technologies

Pre-treatment

Raw water from bore holes is obtained by drilling and shows a 422 µS/cm conductivity.

The pre-treatment consists of :

• Cartridge filtration to remove the suspended matter
• Injection of sequestering agents to prevent the fouling of the reverse osmosis membranes by calcium and magnesium precipitation, and to remove the possible silica.

Primary treatment using reverse osmosis technology

The MegaRO™ deionizer is a skid-mounted and pre-tested system developed by Veolia Water STI, including an electric box, the instrumentation, and a 1 µm filtration stage.

The MegaRO™ Reverse Osmosis unit produces high purity water:Up to 98% of dissolved inorganic matter and over 99% of large dissolved organics, colloids and particles are removed from the raw water. Mega RO also ensures bacteria removal.
The purified water obtained after RO optimizes the lifespan of the resin used in the downstream polishing stage.

Secondary treatment

• Polishing of RO permeate water: demineralization on mixed-bed ion exchange unit that can be regenerated off-site (AQUADEM)

Associated Services

• Supply of chemicals (HYDREX™ range)
• After-sale service and local support