8,3 billion liters of clean water a day for the Big Apple

Nedap supplied the lamp drivers for the largest UV drinking water purification plant for New York City, the biggest one ever built.

September 17 • 3 min read

Case study

Low-pressure

8,3 billion liters of clean water a day for the Big Apple

Nedap supplied the lamp drivers for the largest UV drinking water purification plant for New York City, the biggest one ever built. The plant can supply 8.3 billion liters of clean water to the more than 9 million inhabitants of New York and environs.

The Catskill/Delaware UV Facility in New York is one of the world’s largest ultraviolet drinking water disinfection facilities. Commissioned in 2013, it was designed to treat up to approximately 2 billion gallons (7.6 billion liters) of drinking water per day, providing an additional disinfection barrier against microorganisms such as Cryptosporidium and Giardia.

The facility treats water from New York City’s Catskill and Delaware reservoir systems before it enters the city’s drinking water distribution network. The installation consists of 20 large-scale low-pressure UV reactors. In total, approximately 12,000 low-pressure UV lamps are powered by 6,000 Nedap lamp drivers.

The scale of the installation illustrates the requirements of continuous, high-volume drinking water treatment. Reliability, energy efficiency and long equipment lifetimes are particularly important, as thousands of lamps and drivers operate together as part of a critical drinking water infrastructure.

Olga Kruidhof

Marketing specialist UV

Most efficient UV driver technology

All over the world there is awareness that clean drinking water is likely to become a scarce resource. New technology will help to increase production and to make the underlying processes more efficient at the same time. Nedap’s low-pressure lamp drivers have a proven efficiency of at least 95%.

UV drinking water plant, New York City

The water is supplied from the Catskill / Delaware reservoirs 160 km from the city of New York.

Solution

To purify the water, 6000 UV Nedap lamp drivers were installed to drive 12.000 low pressure lamps. In this way the gigantic, hyper-modern purification plant is highly efficient in energy use.

Results

In the end, the decisive factor was our low-energy solution. This not only saves a great deal of money, but no less importantly, also reduces CO2 emissions, emphasizing Nedap’s focus on more sustainable operation.

Full control with Nedap software

Dedicated Nedap software can be used by engineers to test the electronic platform and to fine tune the UV lamp settings in relation to the required UV levels. The embedded software has a diagnose functionality to report about lamp status, lamp failure, lamp driver temperature and other system operations. A perfect solution to improve the im plementation processes and to reduce installation costs and time.