About MorWater

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Andrew Mortlock - Director: I have completed turn-key projects for mining, municipal water & wastewater, and industrial waste water solutions in over a dozen countries throughout 25+ years in the industry.

For the past 15 years my focus has been on containerised water treatment plants for mainly mining applications. 

Based in Thailand, MorWater can offer containerised or packaged water treatment plants, built to the required standards or specifications by partnering with local Thai Georg Fisher distributor Vicchi Engineering in Bangkok. 

Both GF and Grundfos Thailand have shown support for my vision and offered generous OEM pricing to help keep initial pricing competitive.

I have designed and quoted hundreds of bespoke WTPs when a handful of designs would have covered 90+% of them. Even raw water sources like process water dams can be treated with the same equipment as bore water in most cases. I know I've got my work cut out, but I want to standardise the filtration plant, and not in 0.5m/hr incremental variants; if you require 37.5m3/hr, you’ll need the 50m3/hr plant, and If I don't have to design and engineer a new plant with bespoke documentation and test procedures++, I’ll sell it to you cheaper than the 37.5m3/hr plant anyway, guaranteed.

For the same reason I will not seek the sharpest pricing from every supplier in town, so I will not tender or quote to ‘preferred equipment lists’ or similar. I believe in partnering with GF piping systems including their Signet range of instrumentation, flange to flange throughout our range we can offer a far simpler service and supply chain solution than carrying a certain range of flow meters, levels sensor, and analytical instruments. You get your valves, o'rings, flow meters, pressure transducers and pH probes++ from the same guys, and they’re everywhere.

I have selected Grundfos as our pump partner not only for their industry acknowledged quality, but equally for the reason above. There will not be a country where you cannot service a MorWater plant. In smaller or remote countries the local distributors for GF and Grundfos are often the same trading company.

WTPs are not medical or aerospace equipment, or even just-in-time production lines, so controls can be selected accordingly. MorWater plants are controlled by Mitsubishi PLC/HMIs, and with more than 30 years’ experience and over 12 million units in factories and plants across the globe, I believe we have selected well.

Add to this the free software factor and knowing that all PLC/HMI software will be available online across our range and operators and maintainers or commissioning engineers anywhere in the world can quickly download current software and/or be making modifications to software to suit site conditions themselves in minutes with any Windows laptop and an Ethernet cable.

As far as site standards for PLCs++, I believe these plants should be looked at like a chiller or other plant and equipment. You drop them down, plug them in and turn them on. You put this in and you get that out. Let me worry about how they do their thing. We have a handful of IO signals available like remote S/S, warnings and alarms, and these can be monitored over Ethernet or controlled through local IO terminals if required.

I do not want a spare parts business. I will organise the supply of the first spare parts order directly with local distributors to ensure they supply and stock the correct parts moving forward. I’d be happy to establish that connection as a part of the service as it can be painful if not addressed.

My end game is to convince a few of my old clients to forgo the tender process for plants that are all very nearly the same. Why tie up engineering resources reinventing the wheel, then making sure it's being built and tested properly? Why wait for VDDR, then wait some more for it to meet your standards? And not all reinventions are improvements.

I aim to offer compliant, performance guaranteed WTPs, 'off the shelf'. A price, a specification, and a lead time, that's it. AM

I have always believed that the best design is the simplest design, and that you should start at the highest level with the very basics you need to get the job done, and work down from there until you can get it to perform reliably. 

Anything you add after that is likely going to create a service or maintenance issue, potentially a warning or fault condition, so I assess the need for each very carefully before they get the nod.

Careful placement of sensors and knowing how to read their outputs can reduce the need for sensors. We use centrifugal feed/filtration pumps so the basic pressure and flow conditions tell us all we need to know about filter fouling. Capture a few cycles and you can provide pointers as to whether the current backwash cycle is optimised, or whether you may be doing it too often, not enough, or if a different backwash duration may benefit. 

The same applies for chemical additions, be it dose rates or potential faults. If we turned our chlorine pump on XX minutes ago but we have yet to see an expected increase in FAC, let’s flip the other pump on and see if that changes things. If it does, let's pop a warning up about that first pump; it's probably lost prime. If not, and the tank level transmitter is telling us the tank has plenty in it, let’s pop up a ‘Check Chlorine Solution Strength’ warning/alarm. By now I’m quite certain that with my system pressure normal and no pump faults that both injection lines have not blocked, and when the operator takes the lid off the chlorine tank and wafts a little over to get a whiff, he’ll find the chlorine has gassed off and he won’t get the ‘usual’ chlorine smell. Or the tank's empty and the level sensor's gone; either way, by now he's worked it out.

There are cases like remote plants where additional monitoring may be necessary due to personnel constraints, but most plants have someone who checks the plant every day or so. These operators and maintainers quickly obtain a feel for the health of the plant and can rattle off ‘normal’ flow, pressure, pH and FAC levels++, within a few percent, and tell you what they’ve been doing with the backwash cycles and why.

With a little training and good literature keen operators can observe these small changes across varying periods of time and predict potential problems and make the necessary changes well before a bunch of additional sensors and a heap of set points will get there. And by taking out the unnecessary sensors they’ll spend more time observing and the tuning the plant than they will maintaining it.

As above, I'm not aiming for many variants. If a particular niche appears, yes, other than that, 5 & 10m3/hr skids, 10, 25, 50, 100, 200m3/hr Plants. Your plant fits in here somewhere, and I’m going to convince you to buy the big one, or a 100+50 for example.

I will start fleshing out the model range and work with Vicchi Engineering to provide pricing online across the range ASAP.

Detailed design on the 200m3/hr and 120m3/day plant has been completed, and when an order is placed and a deposit received the buyer will be sent a 'VDDR Package' containing all of the engineering and QA documentation typically required with similar vendor packages. As detailed design is completed on more models this will become available across the range. 

Blank Factory Acceptance Test (FAT) sheets will be provided in the VDDR Package, with completed FAT sheets emailed to the client immediately after successful factory testing. A plant-specific Manufacturer's Data Report (MDR) will be provided prior to shipping.

I am hoping to spend as little time as possible in clarification meetings and trying to get drawings signed off, etc. My goal is to enhance and add to these 'VDDR Packages' until they meet or exceed any organisation's vendor documentation requirements.

I aim grow this site quickly. I have a keen interest in AI and I will add a handy AI WT Expert Chatbot who can walk you through our range and answer most water treatment queries.

I will add calculators I find useful. See below re integrating these calculators into a plant configurator, or vice versa.

I'm in the process of adding my 3D models to the website so users can zoom in a have a look around the plants. I will look for a solution with an 'ENTER VR' option. I am also a keen VR fan and find it helpful and pretty cool to walk around my designs and check service access and the general fit and feel of the layout.

I am working on an interactive plant configurator, with 3D model containers and parts. Not carte blanche, but a user enters their requirements re volume/velocity, and solids loading, effluent quality targets++, and an algorithm generates an equipment list. For example: You will need 4 x 1800mm media filters, Duty/Standby 15kW Feed Pumps, 2 x Chemical Dosing Systems, whatever boxes are checked in the configurator. The user can then grab themselves a container or two and see if this is a 20 foot container or a 40 foot container, or multiples of either size plant, with little 3D filters and pumps and tanks etc. (NOTE: I'm not building everybody's Homer! If it's better than mine, take a screen shot. I'm in! AM) (ANOTHER NOTE: Maybe an AI tilt; let it have a crack?) (FINAL NOTE: This serves no purpose and is very nerdy. It should probably just go. AM)

The algorithm is a work in progress and is already impressive at recommending filter sizing based on the inputs above for both circular and rectangular filters. An algorithm that points you to the most suitable product in our range based on your inputs is my initial target.

AI - I'm a believer. A fan. The AI WT Expert Chatbot is a pet project/hobby. I have a 20,000-strong QA pair water treatment training dataset and I've already fine-tuned a few models on it to good effect.

I'd love to add some feedback from The Bot's responses. Training LLMs is pretty intuitive, and if people were willing to tell me where The Bot went wrong, even a thumbs down or star score, I could fix it. And it's a pet project I believe in, so I would. I'd like to have a crack at making The Bot genuinely useful and reliable as a source of information relating to our industry.

WHAT'S NEXT FOR EQUIPMENT? 

I am definitely going to stick one of the little skids into an air-conditioned/insulated 20' container with a Microfilter, 15kL Inbuilt HDPE Potable Water Tank, Grundfos Hydro MPC Booster Pump Set and Duty/Standby UVs. Fully self-contained, and it could turn almost any raw water source into WHO quality potable water and shower 30 people at a time for over an hour with it. This is a bit of a bug-bear for me, as I have quoted/tendered for well over 50 of these small 5-10m3/hr Potable WTPs and built more than 30 of them, all different.

I'm not trying to build Ferraris here, more Toyota Hilux. Rather than grow the range or add frills I'd prefer to direct our efforts at building these plants better and more efficiently, and with volume increase our buying power with our partners to keep the quality whilst reducing the price of our plants to the point where you'd be silly to buy anything else.

I'll keep dreaming! AM.