The ADC operates at the US Navy’s Seawater Desalination Test Facility at Port Hueneme, California.  The facility is part of the Naval Facilities Engineering Service Center and is located on the US Navy Base.  The Seawater Desalination Test Facility is unique because it is fully instrumented for evaluating water treatment processes and because of its access to the Pacific Ocean.  The site has been a key testing facility for more than twenty years, especially for the evaluation of reverse osmosis (RO) systems and related components.  Being able to evaluate equipment with natural seawater allows data to be collected under “real world” conditions and allows water treatment prototypes utilizing new technology to be directly compared with more traditional hardware.  Data is collected by the facility’s experienced staff, which has worked with virtually all types of water treatment processes and has helped develop many desalination-related components in their careers.  
     
 
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  The ADC II test and demonstration is a multi-step process shown in the Affordable Desalination Collaboration Overview diagram.  First, (1) the water is taken from a short pier that extends into the Port Hueneme Harbor channel.  Seawater is then pumped (2) to a central 5000 gallon collection tank (3) that stores seawater for the entire facility.   The water is then fed by gravity to the intake of the Advanced Filtration Skid (4).

Initially, the ADC will test and demonstrate GE Zenon’s ZeeWeed® 1000 advanced filtration system using natural Pacific Ocean seawater.  The ZeeWeedÒ based water treatment system is a low energy immersed membrane process that consists of outside-in, hollow-fiber modules immersed directly in the feed-water. The small pore size of the membranes ensures that no particulate matter, including Cryptosporidium oocysts, Giardia cysts, suspended solids or other contaminants of concern, will pass into the treated water stream. The ZeeWeed® 1000 immersed membrane system can easily remove particles that are greater than 0.1 microns in size without any pretreatment.  The ZeeWeed® 1000 process is compatible with upstream pretreatment methods such as enhanced coagulation and oxidation, which convert contaminants from dissolved to suspended forms that are unable to pass through the membrane.  These features may help the ADC and other full scale seawater desalination systems operate more reliably through California’s summer water conditions including green algae blooms and red tides.		  
     
 
 
     
  After the UF system, the treated RO feed water then passes onto the ADC’s ultra efficient seawater desalination system (5).  There have been major advances in seawater desalination over the past ten years that include isobaric energy recovery systems, improved pumping technologies, and low energy membranes.  The ADC’s SWRO process takes advantage of and optimizes all these advancements in one scaleable pilot system.  Some of the advanced features of the ADC SWRO system include isobaric energy recovery (ix), an efficient main high pressure pump (vii), and low energy SWRO membranes (x).  In addition if budget and time allow it, ADC II will seek out and test additional technologies that promise to improve and reduce the total costs of desalination by reverse osmosis.

Backwash water from the process is sent to the backwash-percolation basin (6) where it is allowed to percolate through the ground back to the sea.  The product water and reject water from the SWRO process are recombined into seawater at the central discharge collection point (7).  Finally, reconstituted seawater flows back to the boat channel through and underground pipe and outfall (8).		  
     
 
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