Desalination Plant Designer: the complete design workflow

The short version

You supply four things the tool cannot know: what you must produce (product flow, product quality), what you can abstract (source), what the water is (analysis), and what the process needs (per-process engineering inputs). Everything else — intake, stage flows, concentrate TDS, equipment duties, the schedule, the BOQ and the report — is calculated by named engines from what you supplied. Where an input is missing, the tool says required input and stops; it never substitutes a plausible number.

The twelve stages below are the same twelve the page shows in its workflow bar, and the guided Design Wizard at the top walks you through them: its Next button is gated, so it will not let you leave a stage whose required inputs are still missing.

The twelve stages

Each stage below names the section in the page it corresponds to, what you enter, and what is calculated for you.

The interactive diagram, and how it connects to everything else

The Dynamic plant flow section draws the actual water path, generated from the same engineering model that produces the numbers. It is a view, not a second model: zoom and pan change how you look at it, never what it says.

• Move around it. Zoom in and out with the on-screen buttons or the scroll wheel, pan by dragging, and fit or reset the view. The canvas scrolls inside itself — the page itself never scrolls sideways, including on a 360 px phone.
• Select a process or a stream. Click a node or a line — or a row in the stream table below the diagram — and both views mark the same thing. Selecting a stage also marks the whole connected route upstream and downstream of it, so you can see what a stage actually touches rather than only its immediate neighbours.
• Read the inspector. The panel under the diagram shows, for the thing you selected: its duty, every metric with its value, its status and the engine that produced it, the equipment sizing, and anything still required. A stream shows flow, hourly rate, TDS, temperature, pressure, whether it is a branch stream, and its source engine. Temperature is read from that stream's own recorded provenance: if you never supplied one, it says not specified on this stream rather than borrowing a number from a neighbouring stream.
• Follow a stage to its design basis. A stage item carries a link to its own entry in Process engineering basis, addressed by a stable process id — not by row order — so it always lands on that stage's inputs and its engine.
• Use it with the keyboard. Nodes and lines are focusable, and arrow keys pan the canvas. If your system asks for reduced motion, the decorative focus animation and the smooth scrolling are switched off; nothing else changes.

The Treatment train canvas above it is the same idea one level up: the process sequence as configured, with each process's duty and its basis.

Assumptions, missing inputs and what "existing" means

Every value on the page carries a status, and the legend at the top of the page defines each one. The three that matter most when reading a design:

• Required input — an engineer input is missing, so the value is not known. The item stays unsized and names the exact input it needs. It is never defaulted.
• Preliminary — calculated on a stated basis that has not been verified against a document, a data sheet or a measurement. The basis is written next to the number.
• Engineer review — the software computed something, but a qualified engineer must verify it before use. A process with no validated quantitative model appears here, not as a performance claim.

Existing equipment deserves its own sentence. A design case can be marked Design, Existing or Hybrid per item. Marking an item Existing means only that you said so: it means no verification record is attached, and the page will keep saying that. It is not a statement that the equipment was inspected, tested or found fit.

Assumptions that apply to the whole plant are collected in their own section with an owner, the basis and the review standing — for example that concentrate TDS is derived by salt conservation rather than assumed, or that equipment is never auto-selected. They are printed in the report too.

Running the design and getting the report

Press Run the design once the stages you care about have their inputs. Without a raw intake the plant model does not start, and the page tells you so rather than guessing one — supply a source flow, or a product target and a recovery, and the required intake is derived for you.

The Engineering report is then generated from the same model as the screen, with every input and result tagged, and it opens in a print view where you can print it or save it as PDF. If you want to see a complete example first, the designer offers a small set of runnable starting bases; each one fills only your own input fields and still has to be run and checked by you.