Earth is known as a “water world”, and for good reason. Oceans cover nearly 75% of the surface, and even the land has many lakes, rivers, and even inland seas and water tables. And for all of history, the human race has needed water for survival. At first, water was used only for drinking, washing, and fishing in ancient times. Now, water has many industrial purposes as well, and public water utilities are the norm in towns and cities throughout the world. Even the ancient Romans and the Harappan civilization of northern India made use of primitive sewage and plumbing systems. Plumbing gets its name from the Roman word for “lead,” since lead was used to line ancient roman pipes (which is why lead’s atomic symbol is Pb). On a more industrial scale, water must be cleaned up and made usable in water processing plants. Those plants use hardware such as a dewatering conveyor, filter belts, metal mesh material, and more to make water safe for use. How can a dewatering conveyor or a mesh belt make water clean? And how might a homeowner clean their water even more?
Industrial Water Cleaning
Water is not ready to use after it comes from a water table, lake, or river. This is especially true with modern industry, which often pollutes the natural world, and that includes polluted water. Even sludge and slurry can be filtered and processed on a dewatering conveyor or other hardware to extract clean, useful water.
A dewatering conveyor is useful for getting water out of sludge, slurry, and other thick materials. It is not enough to put this material into a tank and allow chemicals or bacteria to clean it up. Instead, sponges, rollers, meshes, and more in a dewatering conveyor will simply squeeze the water out of mud, muck, and sludge. This extracted water can be further treated in the system, while the leftover waste is made into a hard, dry leftover material that is then discarded. Sometimes, the water has to be totally separated from thick compounds before it can be treated, and a dewatering conveyor will do just that by physical rather than chemical means.
At a water processing plant, chemicals, tanks, filters, and benign bacteria populations are all used to purify water and remove dirt and harmful organic materials from it. Sometimes, water may be exposed to chemicals and bacteria inside a tank to kill off and break down organic material or viruses and microscopic parasites, and the water can then flow further into the system. Solid, physical solvents can be removed when water flows through filters, and these processes are repeated until water is clean enough to enter the mainstream plumbing utilities.
Home Water Filtration
The water that enters a home’s utilities such as the sink, washing machines, or shower should be clean enough to use or drink. Sometimes, however, this water may need a little extra cleaning. There are commercial products and services to help with this, and hard water may be one such reason to invest in new hardware. What is hard water? This describes when dissolved calcium or magnesium is concentrated to certain levels in water, and hard water can be a nuisance. Hard water may be diagnosed when dry spots of calcium appear on plates or get caked into clothes, and hard water may also irritate the scalp and hair of someone who bathes in it.
Water softener hardware can be installed when a concerned homeowner contacts local crews who can set up these devices in the home’s pipes. These water softeners will use electrically charged metal beads to attract the calcium or magnesium atoms in the water and coat themselves with those atoms. Once saturated, a water filter bead will scrub itself clean in a side tank that has salt sediments at the bottom, and now it is ready to resume work. Water hardness is a common problem, and in fact a majority of American houses or public buildings may be dealing with hard water. There is in fact a scale used to measure water hardness, and plumbers may be asked to measure a home’s water and use that scale. Hard enough water may call for the installation of water softener devices to fix this problem.