Glorinda’s services
Desalination
At Glorinda, we design and deliver seawater and brackish water desalination plants, engineered around the intake water quality and the duty the product water needs to serve.
Seawater and Brackish Water Desalination
Coastal and water-scarce regions need to produce fresh water from saline sources. Reverse osmosis is the leading technology because it can be scaled effectively and energy recovery has improved its economic performance. Seawater desalination for drinking water is one of Glorinda’s four core water treatment areas.
The difference between a desalination plant that operates reliably and one that frequently struggles with membrane fouling is often the pretreatment. An intake affected by seasonal algal blooms, suspended silt, high organic load, or oil contamination can damage a membrane system designed only on standard seawater data.
Your solution can be desalination, designed against your intake.
“The desalination plant we have keeps fouling”.
What problem does it solve?
Glorinda designs pretreatment based on the actual intake conditions and seasonal variations before finalising the main system.
Brackish water presents different challenges. It typically carries lower salinity but often higher silica, hardness and specific ion concentrations, as this requires a different membrane and water recovery strategy than seawater does.
Benefits
Pretreatment sized on real data
Media filtration, dissolved air flotation, ultrafiltration, and ceramic or silicon carbide membranes where the intake is difficult, selected against seasonal analysis rather than a nominal one.
The right membrane for the salinity
Seawater RO for full-strength intake, brackish water RO where salinity is lower and silica or hardness dominate, and high-efficiency RO where fouling is the practical limit.
Energy where it can be recovered
Energy recovery on the high-pressure reject is what makes seawater RO viable. We design it in rather than treating it as an option.
Concentrate is part of the design
Brine disposal, dilution or, where a valuable salt is present, recovery. A plant designed without a concentrate strategy is not a finished design.
Operable by the people you have
Automation, instrumentation and operator training scaled to the site. A remote municipal plant and a refinery utility block need very different control philosophies.
Post-treatment for the actual duty
Remineralisation for potable supply, ion exchange, mixed bed or EDI where the water feeds a boiler or a process. Desalinated water is not automatically fit for either without conditioning.
How it works
A desalination plant is an intake, a pretreatment train, a high-pressure membrane array with energy recovery, a post-treatment stage and a concentrate route. The membranes get the attention, but the intake and the concentrate are what cause the problems.
01
Intake and screening
Open intake or beach well, screening, and the seasonal characterisation that determines everything downstream: turbidity, silt density index, algal load, organics and any industrial contamination in the vicinity.
02
Pretreatment
Dissolved air flotation for algal blooms and oil, media filtration for bulk solids, and ultrafiltration or ceramic and SiC membranes where the intake is genuinely difficult. This stage sets membrane cleaning frequency and membrane life.
03
Reverse osmosis with energy recovery
High-pressure pumping through the membrane array, with energy recovery on the reject stream. Seawater and brackish water arrays differ in pressure, staging and recovery, and brackish water systems often need a second pass or a different antiscalant strategy for silica.
04
Post-treatment
Remineralisation and pH adjustment for potable supply. For industrial duty, ion exchange, mixed bed or EDI polishing where the water feeds boilers or process, and disinfection where the distribution system requires a residual.
05
Concentrate management
Outfall design and dilution where discharge is permitted, further concentration where it is not. Where the brine contains recoverable salts, crystallisation turns a disposal problem into a product.
Where desalination is used
Desalination is designed and customised for each site’s intake conditions and end-use requirements. Glorinda develops tailored desalination solutions for municipal and industrial water supply across a wide range of industries.
Oil, gas and petrochemical
Food and pharma
Power generation
Agriculture and agro-processing
Municipal
Mining
Chemical
Typical usages
- Seawater desalination for drinking water supply
- Brackish water desalination for inland municipal supply
- Industrial make-up water where fresh sources are exhausted
- Seawater or brackish water; does it change the design much?
- Debottlenecking an existing desalination plant limited by fouling
- Replacing tankered water on remote sites
- Emergency and temporary supply
Where the cost of desalination is actually decided
Selecting a process is an engineering decision, not a purchasing one. We run feasibility and pre-feasibility studies, characterise the stream, compare the routes on capital and operating cost, and act as owner’s engineer while somebody else builds it if that suits you better.
Related Technologies
Related Products
Frequently asked questions
Substantially. Seawater RO runs at much higher pressure, needs energy recovery to be economic, and lives or dies on intake pretreatment. Brackish water RO runs at lower pressure but often faces higher silica and hardness, which changes the antiscalant strategy, the recovery target and sometimes the membrane choice.
Usually, and usually by changing the pretreatment rather than the membranes. We would start with a membrane autopsy and a proper intake characterisation to find out what is actually fouling, then decide.
No. Desalinated water needs conditioning for whatever duty it serves. For potable supply that means remineralisation and pH adjustment; for boiler feed it means ion exchange, mixed bed or EDI polishing.
It depends on the permit. Outfall with proper dilution where discharge is allowed; further concentration and crystallisation where it is not, or where the salts are worth recovering. We settle the concentrate route before finalising the recovery target, not after.
Take this further
Send us the stream data, the discharge limit or the equipment list you are working from. An engineer reads every enquiry and replies with the questions that actually decide the solution — not a brochure.