Marco, water treatment is very important for Grundfos. There are many water treatment applications around the world.
I think there are a lot of different applications that need different solutions.

Yeah, that’s true. Especially in industries, we have a lot of different points of applications. And in the industrial environment we have a lot of water usage. For instance, cooling towers are quite water intensive. And I think there are also a lot of challenges around the cooling tower that we need to solve.

So, if you look at cooling tower operation, we see a lot of challenges. When we visited our customers to see their installations, we realised that a lot of these installations are handled manually.

However, that causes some challenges and one example of this is biological contamination.
Biological contamination can cause biofilm in the pipes and on the heat exchanger, which reduces the capacity of the cooling tower, but also increases the energy consumption.

The second challenge is the increase of the salt concentration, which happens if you don’t check the conductivity or the time and react to it.

And that leads to scaling, which results in an even higher energy consumption.

Finally, how do we handle the chemicals that are used inside the cooling tower?

If you do not dose a correct amount, it could lead to overdosing or underdosing which can cause other issues.

So, Marco, you’ve seen we have a lot of challenges in cooling tower water. But the way I see it is that these challenges will increase if more and more customers use water reuse as a source for this cooling tower make-up water.

Biological contaminants will grow faster, so there are definitely more challenges ahead. And we need some intelligent solutions to handle that.

That is true, Carsten. In terms of cooling towers, we have something to offer for all kinds of cases. That includes solutions for both water reuse water sources and natural water sources, allowing us to do things smarter than before.

I said before that we already have solutions at Grundfos to help our customers with the challenges they face in their cooling tower applications.

The first is an example of proper measurement and control equipment that we need in a cooling tower to not only show the result of our treatment, but also control the result of the treatment.

We also need it to document whether the measurement complies with rules and regulations.

Next, there are our precise dosing pumps. These pumps precisely dose the required amount of chemicals into the process – nothing more, nothing less.

So that’s another intelligent solution. When we connect these dosing pumps to the chemical app, we can ensure that the operator can operate chemicals safely and securely, for instance, by avoiding mixing chemicals that are potentially dangerous when mixed.

Once again, we can show what we have dosed into the process, so we, once again, can comply with local regulations.

Last but not least, with an intelligent system setup and solution, we can connect the different components together, so they speak the same language and work together, thereby optimising the process.

This is all handled under the umbrella of the so-called Grundfos iSOLUTIONS where we see a need for a different approach and a need to handle entire systems differently in the future.