Membrane Treatment Monitoring
Membrane Process & Emergency Membrane-Tank Monitoring at Beijing Cuihu Plant
1 / 3Project Background
Beijing OriginWater's Cuihu plant runs an MBR membrane process whose feed and product quality requirements are strict — and whose emergency membrane tank adds a further layer of monitoring responsibility, with turbidity precision down to 0.1 NTU needed to steer membrane backwash.
Customer Challenge
Membrane backwash control demands turbidity measurement precise below 0.1 NTU — beyond the error range of ordinary turbidity meters. The emergency tank required large-batch instrumentation, and with so many measurement points, every device had to be stable and reliable to protect the membranes from fouling damage and premature replacement.
The TENGINE Solution
TENGINE deployed 69 instruments of 6 major types across the membrane process and a further 124 sets for the emergency membrane tank: MLSS sludge concentration meters, DPH digital pH, ORP, conductivity, TUL ultrasonic level, TPS pressure transmitters, TSS turbidity/suspended-solids analyzers, TRC residual chlorine, PSS portable turbidity and the MTU high-precision turbidity analyzer — the latter certified by the national metrology institute with measurement error ≤5%, far better than the 10% national standard, for precise backwash control at sub-0.1 NTU levels.
Implementation
All instruments were integrated into the plant's automation system, with real-time water-quality data interlocking the membrane backwash process to protect the membrane modules.
Project Results
The membrane process and emergency tank are now covered by complete, metrology-grade monitoring: backwash is automatically controlled on precise low-turbidity data, membrane fouling risk and replacement costs are down, and the plant's refined, automated membrane operation sets a reliability reference for membrane water treatment.
Related Case Studies
A mega-project of this scale places extreme demands on water quality data  accuracy and stability must hold over decades of operation. The wastewater treatment works required continuous online monitoring of oil content in water: a demanding measurement that has to run unattended in a harsh coastal desert environment, resist fouling, and integrate cleanly into plant process control.
Membrane performance calibration demands precise, time-aligned and traceable water-quality data to verify retention, anti-fouling and cleaning-recovery behavior. The pain points were acute: micro-leakage is hard to detect, and instrument drift under variable operating conditions contaminates the baseline data that the whole evaluation depends on.
Sludge concentration and blanket-level measurement were unreliable, so discharge relied on operator experience. Timing and volume were hard to control precisely — under-discharge, over-discharge and sludge loss all occurred, destabilizing effluent quality and pushing up running costs.
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