Desalination • Whole-Plant Design & Mass Balance

Desalination Plant Designer

Compose the whole plant as one ordered chain of unit operations. Every run closes the stage and whole-plant water and salt balance, derives concentrate TDS by salt conservation — never assumed — and derives membrane product TDS from salt rejection. Every output is labelled input, derived or missing; a blank field is never presented as verified.

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Step 1 of 12 Requirements

    01

    Design control center

    Where the design stands and what is outstanding. The plant flow below is the authoritative diagram of the whole plant, and the report prints that same projection.

    Plant flow — the authoritative process and equipment diagram

    The real water path through your design: source, pumps, every stage you configured in process order, and the permeate/concentrate split. Every node and stream is generated from the same engineering model that drives the requirements, sizing, schedule, BOQ and report — nothing here is a picture. This is the same projection the report prints. Select any item to see its duty, its basis and what is still required.

    Select equipment or a stream in the diagram, or a row in the stream table below, to inspect its engineering duty. Hover either to follow the link.

    • Source
    • Pump
    • Process stage
    • Product / waste
    Plant flow as a table (text alternative)
    Project No project name yet Edit project

    Optional engineering project attributes. Nothing here is required, and no personal or account data is stored. Saved locally in this browser.

    Designs are stored in this browser only. There is no account and no cloud sync — clearing site data removes them, so export anything you need to keep.

    Demo cases — 9 runnable starting points

    9 complete, runnable starting bases — open one, then Run the design to see the full intake-to-product chain calculate. Each case fills only your own input fields; every number that follows is computed by the same engines this page always uses. The figures are an illustrative starting basis to replace with your project data — not a reference design, a vendor recommendation or a compliance case.

    Want to compare them before you open one? See every case with its engineering basis in the Demo Gallery.

    Design control center

    Where this design stands

    Read from the engineering model. Nothing here is estimated, and no item is counted as done because a field is merely filled in.

    View design details
    Design summary

    The current design state at a glance. Every value is either supplied by you, derived by an EngiMetric engine, verified manufacturer data, missing, or awaiting engineer review — nothing is defaulted.

    Project state

    Where the design actually stands, area by area. The overall state is the worst area, so one missing input can never be hidden behind many calculated ones. Nothing here is a readiness guess: each state is decided from values and checks the engineering model already produced.

    Design review — what is outstanding, and why

    Every outstanding item in the model’s own words: what is wrong, why it matters, which engine produced the underlying value, and what is required next. This is a deterministic reading of the engineering model — there is no AI inference here, and nothing is estimated to fill a gap.

    Engineering validation centre

    Every check the engines already perform, collected in one place with its source and next action. No check is recomputed here.

    Design scenario (what-if)

    Test a change to the product requirement without touching your base design. The scenario re-runs the same engines and shows what moves downstream. A scenario is not the approved design.

    Design case vs operating case (B18)

    The design case is the intent this plant was sized to. An operating case is the point it is actually held at — a seasonal feed, an availability the site can really deliver, a recovery the operators can really achieve. The pair reports each fact's deviation from the design basis and its direction. It does not score, rate or approve the operating point, and EngiMetric holds no plant operating data: every operating figure below is one you enter.

    02

    Inputs & basis

    What has to be true before anything can be sized. Every figure here is stated by you; nothing on this band is inferred, defaulted or assumed.

    01 — Product / project requirements

    The first engineering question is what you are required to produce. From the required product flow and the plant recovery target, the raw intake the plant must abstract is derived — you do not have to invent it. Where a value cannot be derived it is reported as data required, never assumed.

    02 — Source & wellfield

    Model the raw-water source: well count, duty/standby split, pumping levels and pumping-test data. A required per-well duty flow is never a confirmed well yield — without pumping-test data the capacity outcome is requires verification.

    03 — Water analysis (optional feedwater chemistry)

    Optional feedwater chemistry, evaluated with the platform’s existing water-analysis engine (hardness, charge balance, TDS by summation, ionic strength, LSI/RSI). Left blank, the fields simply skip the derivation they would enable — a blank is never assumed to be zero. The measured TDS below flows into the design basis and the treatment-train salt checks.

    The derived hardness, charge balance and saturation indices reuse Water Analysis & Treatment Selection — the same engine, on one page. Use that surface for a full ion analysis; the fields here cover the common desalination feedwater ions (Ca, Mg, Na, Cl, HCO₃, SO₄).

    04 — Design basis: feed & operating rates

    Feed and product rates, the per-unit allocation and the source-capacity verdict are derived by the design-basis engine from your product requirement in section 01. Recovery is never assumed, and the plant intake is checked against the derived feed demand.

    Product flow, recovery and operating hours are captured once in section 01 — Product / project requirements and reused here. There is no second place to enter them.

    Hydraulic design basis (optional — pump head & power)

    Optional pump hydraulic basis for the raw-water transfer and per-stage feed pumps. Every component is optional: a missing value stays missing — head is never assumed, and no pipe length, diameter, roughness, elevation or pressure is fabricated. The RO high-pressure pump duty uses the feed pressure you enter on the RO stage row in section 06.

    Friction loss is computed by the existing Darcy-Weisbach engine when pipe geometry is supplied. Total dynamic head composes static head + friction + minor losses + discharge pressure via the existing pump-head engine. Motor power uses the existing pump-power engine. No hydraulic formula is re-implemented here.

    03

    Process & treatment train

    The water path itself: which processes exist, in what order, on what stated basis, and what the mass balance then conserves. This is where the engineering happens.

    05 — Treatment selection Basis not stated

    The platform’s treatment-selection ladder maps observed water-quality drivers to candidate unit operations that already exist here. It is a starting point for verification — with the engineering step that must be confirmed (jar test, pilot, membrane projection, governing standard) — never a thresholded diagnosis. Cross-check the full surface at Water Analysis & Treatment Selection.

    06 — Treatment train

    Where you configure the design: which processes exist, in what order, and on what stated basis. Read this while you are choosing processes. The plant flow earlier in this workspace is the single diagram of the result — the real water path through the equipment — and it projects the same mass balance this train is built from, so the two cannot disagree.

    All three are inputs to one process graph. Every flow, quality, duty and equipment quantity shown anywhere in EngiMetric derives from it, so the mass balance, hydraulics, equipment schedule, BOQ and report can never disagree. Nothing here is a second plant model.

    Treatment process configuration

    Build the plant as an ordered process graph. Add, reorder or remove any pretreatment, RO pass or post-treatment step. Flows and qualities are carried from one step to the next by the existing engines — a step is never fed an invented value. A step with no validated basis in EngiMetric is shown as Preliminary and reports Engineer Review rather than claiming a performance number.

    The default train is a well field, a media filter, antiscalant, a high-pressure pump, one RO pass, remineralisation and product storage. Add more steps to configure a second RO pass or a different pretreatment.

      Process engineering basis

      What each configured process needs in order to be designed, and the engine that does the work. Use Configure on a step in the configuration above to enter them. Values belong to the process, not to a row position, so reordering the train cannot move a design input onto the wrong stage.

      Modular package plant (delivery scope)

      A factory-integrated package plant changes how the design is procured and delivered, not how it treats water. Mark the configured steps that ship inside the package, and record the envelope figures you have. Every figure stays yours: EngiMetric holds no container geometry, no skid frame weight and no transport data, so anything you have not supplied is reported as Required Input rather than estimated.

      Per-process engineering inputs

      Specialized stage data for the membrane technologies that have their own sizing engines — UF, NF, RO and IX. These cards appear only for a technology that is actually configured in the train above. Leave a field blank to mean not requested: EngiMetric then reports a Required Input and names exactly what is missing, rather than assuming a standard.

      Equipment sizing inputs (optional)

      Each blank field simply means that size is not requested — EngiMetric then reports not applicable and never assumes a standard. Fill one field of a group and the whole group becomes data required, naming exactly what is still missing. Every figure below is produced by an existing platform engine: tank storage, media-filter sizing, antiscalant dosing, and pipe sizing.

      All flows m³/day · TDS mg/L · recoveries and rejoi…
      07 — Plant mass balance

      The whole-plant water and salt balance, derived by the plant mass-balance engine after every run. Concentrate TDS is derived by salt conservation — never assumed.

      Engineering status

      04

      Engineering outputs

      What the project has to hand over. Each artefact is built from the model above and carries its provenance back to the calculation that produced it.

      08 — Engineering requirements

      The bridge from calculation to equipment. Each requirement is derived where a duty basis exists and data required where engineer input is missing — nothing is invented.

      09 — Equipment selection (verified catalog & product matching)

      Find equipment against a requirement using the verified manufacturer catalog. Matching shows per-criterion evidence and never an opaque score. The engineer explicitly selects; the software never selects on your behalf.

      10 — Equipment schedule

      The schedule of engineer-selected products, each row traceable back to the requirement it satisfies.

      11 — Bill of quantities (BOQ)

      A quantity schedule derived from the selected equipment. Prices are never fabricated: every line is price unavailable until the engineer records a real quotation or published price.

      12 — Engineering report (traceability foundation)

      The report data contract and the end-to-end traceability chain (BOQ → schedule → product → requirement → calculation). Full PDF generation is integrated with the existing report architecture; this section establishes the data foundation and the audit trail.

      Assumptions register — design basis & stated modes

      Every assumption the current design relies on, with the owner role, the basis/standard it is bound to and its review standing. An existing or hybrid item or a stated stream value is an assumption with no verification record attached until the engineer signs it off — stating it never makes it verified.

      Method and references

      Each stage’s feed starts from the raw intake and becomes the next stage’s feed (feed = previous product + optional make-up). Stage flows come from product = feed × recovery/100 and waste = feed − product. Concentrate TDS is derived by the stage salt balance Qw·Cw = Qf·Cf − Qp·Cp, and membrane-stage product TDS from Cp = Cf × (1 − R/100). Plant recovery is final product ÷ raw intake.

      The whole-plant water check closes intake + make-up = product + waste. No threshold, standard or performance value is invented here: recoveries, TDS and rejection are engineer-supplied inputs, and defaults are illustrative examples — never recommendations.

      Engine: plantDesigner.ts (this surface) over plantMassBalance.ts and the platform salt.ts permeate-TDS helper. A plant with missing salt data passes its water checks but is not a verified salt balance.

      Workspace

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      Saved calculations in this browser can be reopened with their inputs intact.

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