WEC Water says it has secured and successfully completed a project for the design, manufacturing, delivery, installation supervision and commissioning of the largest packaged filtered water treatment plant the company has built to date.
Destined for a large copper mine in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the plant has been designed to produce 680 m3/h filtered water to be used for service water for the mine. The plant consists of two treatment trains each with a flocculation tank, three clarifiers, four multimedia filters, and intermediate storage tanks. WEC Water engineered an automated chemical dosing system designed to provide precision control of all chemical dosing. The feedwater is sourced from the mine’s tailing dam, boreholes and surface water.
Nigel Birchall, Senior Project Manager at WEC Water: “Not only is this the largest packaged water treatment plant of its type that we have delivered anywhere in Africa, but the project also required considerable logistical management of a total of 18 trucks. The plant itself is based on WEC’s standard filtered water treatment package plant with several customisations integrated into the basic design to meet the requirements of the client.”
The design and manufacturing phases of the project took seven months. Once built and assembled in South Africa, the plant was packed and transported to site, which took another two months. Says Birchall: “It was critical that we managed the entire logistical process, ensuring constant communications between the transport service provider and the logistics team, to ensure that we not only met our deadlines but also that every component reached its destination.”
Birchall adds: “The plant is designed with a high-level of automation, from the filtration to the dosing processes and requires little operator intervention. While this is a new client for us, WEC Water has completed a number of similar water and wastewater treatment projects for African mining operations in countries such as Côte d’Ivoire, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and the Republic of Guinea.”