Automated Water Analysis Helps Ondeo Nalco

Founded in 1928 in Chicago, Illinois, Ondeo Nalco today is one of the world's leading companies in the sectors of water treatment, waste water purification and process optimisation.

Ondeo Nalco manufactures speciality chemicals and offers innovative technology programs that help to improve the cost-efficiency of industrial plants as well as to minimise the consumption of resources and environmental pollution.

Apart from the chemical and pharmaceutical industries, it is above all, the food industry, the energy sector and the paper and textile industry that are Ondeo Nalco's customers.

Ondeo Nalco's Pacific Technical Centre in Singapore has a laboratory for applied research and an analytical laboratory.

The latter provides services for customers and fied engineers throughout the whole of Asian-Pacific region.

It offers technical support for questions and problems in the following application areas; waste water, cooling water, boiler water, deionised water, ultra pure water and recycling.

Currently about 3000 water samples are analysed per month in the analytical laboratory, 90% of which are from Singapore.

These analyses were previously carried out manually and required a huge number of time consuming individual determinations.

In order to cope with the ever increasing number of samples, the Ondeo Nalco Pacific management decided to search for an automated solution and therefore contacted Metrohm.

The automated titration system in detail :- The water analysis system consists of a 736 GP Titrino, a 730 Sample Changer with swing out head, a 712 Conductivity meter, several Dosino (dispensers) as well as METRODATA SOFTWARE.

32X 120ml water samples can be analysed in a single run.

A single sample aliquot is all that is required for determining four important water parameters throughout a wide concentration range : conductivity, pH value, carbonate hardness (alkalinity,p and m values), the conductivity measurement must take place before the sample comes into contact with the glass electrode, as otherwise the electrolyte outflow from the pH electrode would falsify the measurement.For this reason a special flow through conductivity cell is used; this is placed up stream from the titration cell.

For pH measurements and titration of the carbonate hardness a specially constructed double-junction pH glass electrode is used that guarantees short response times and stable measuring values even in ion-deficient water samples.

At the end of the determinations the analytical results are automatically exported to LIMS by TiNet software.

Water parameters determined Conductivity 10S.4000uS/cm pH value 5S.11 Carbonate hardness p value 10S.300ppm m value 10S.500ppm Chloride 10S.1000ppm The Convincing benefits :- The automated titration system from Metrohm completely fulfilled the expectations of the laboratory Manager, Mrs Sharyn Gaspari and her team.

The sample throughput has been considerable increased, resulting in improved efficiency.

During an 8 hour shift more than 70 water samples can be analysed.

The manual work required has been reduced to a minimum.

The personnel being freed from routine work, thus saving time for other activities.

Additional decisive advantages are the increased reliability and improved precision of the results.

This extremely positive experienced has led Ondeo Nalco Pacific to purchase a second Metrohm titration system in order to be able to keep on top of the expected increase in the number of samples.

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