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The City of Bonita Springs is located in southwest Florida on the Gulf coast in one of themost rapidly growing areas of the country. Bonita Springs Utilities, Inc. (BSU) is a member-ownednot-for-profit utility established to supply potable water and wastewater service withinits defined service/franchise area. The franchise area is approximately 60 square miles insize, and includes all of the City of Bonita Springs, Florida and an additional area ofunincorporated Lee County. The utility's West Water Reclamation Facility (WWRF) has apermitted capacity of 7.0 million gallons per day (mgd). All of the effluent from the WWRF issold to an irrigation utility for reuse. To meet the growth in wastewater flows, BSU beganplanning for a new 4 mgd East Water Reclamation Facility (EWRF) that, like the WWRF,would also be designed for 100 percent reuse of the plant effluent. Membrane bioreactortechnology was selected for that facility, in part, because of the high quality effluent that theprocess produces for reuse customers. This paper discusses the effluent reuse qualityrequirements, the design of the MBR facility, and in particular the innovative universaldesign approach that would uniquely allow multiple hollow fiber membrane equipmentvendors to compete for the equipment procurement contract.As part of the design process, a "universal design" concept was developed. The idea was toproduce a single design that could accommodate two manufacturers of immersed hollowfiber membrane systems to allow flexibility in manufacturer selection for the current projectand to allow flexibility in future facility expansion or equipment replacement at the end of itsuseful life, and for future equipment replacement if one manufacturer's membranes provideda technological advantage over another manufacturer. Preliminary designs were preparedto determine feasibility and estimate what additional capital cost would be required toimplement the concept. It was determined that the additional design cost required for theequipment selection phase was warranted; however, the additional capital cost required forconstruction of the universal design was not justified, in part because of the likely evolutionof membrane equipment configurations within the foreseeable future. The system wasultimately designed around the configuration of one equipment supplier. The reason for thatdesign, the benefits of maintaining a universal design prior to procurement, and the methodused to develop the universal design concept are discussed in the paper. Includes tables, figures.

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Edition: Vol. - No. Published: 03/01/2005 Number of Pages: 11 File Size: 1 file , 460 KB