Lime Softening, pH Adjustment, and Flue Gas Desulfurization Equipment for Philadelphia Area Industry
Reagent preparation and dosing systems engineered by RDP Technologies for refining, chemical, waste to energy, and district energy operations along the Delaware River corridor.
Request a Quote Where RDP Is InstalledReagent Systems for the Delaware Valley Industrial Corridor
The stretch of riverfront running from the Navy Yard down through Marcus Hook and Trainer holds one of the densest concentrations of industrial water and air treatment obligations anywhere in the Mid-Atlantic. Refining, specialty chemical, pharmaceutical, waste to energy, and district energy operations all lean on the same reagent to solve very different problems. RDP Technologies has been engineering the equipment that prepares and delivers that reagent for over 45 years. For the municipal side of the region, our Philadelphia water and wastewater treatment equipment page covers drinking water, biosolids, and solids handling.
pH Adjustment for Industrial Users Discharging Under Philadelphia Pretreatment Permits
Philadelphia operates one of the oldest and largest industrial pretreatment programs in the country, and significant industrial users across the city discharge to the sewer under permits with hard numeric limits on pH and metals. Cross the river into South Jersey or head down into Delaware County and the permit writer changes but the obligation does not. Metal finishing shops, pharmaceutical manufacturers, food processors, and the chemical operations clustered around Marcus Hook all produce streams that arrive well outside an acceptable discharge window and have to be corrected before they leave the fence line.
Lime slurry is still the workhorse reagent for that correction. Raising pH pulls the stream back into compliance and drops dissolved metals out as hydroxides at the same time, which is why a single lime system often resolves two permit parameters rather than one. The difficulty is never the chemistry. It is that batch operations produce wildly uneven flow and loading, and a feed system tuned for an average condition will underfeed during a surge and overfeed the rest of the shift.
Dosing on the Tekkem platform is automatic, driven by whatever setpoint basis the plant chooses, so pH holds steady through those swings without an operator parked at the panel. Feed reaches several injection points off a single continuous loop, metered by pinch valve and flow meter, and the lines stay clear of scale. Underfeeding costs a violation and overfeeding costs reagent plus the sludge it creates, so precision here pays twice.
Inside the Tekkem Operating System
Lime Softening for Steam Generation and Process Water at Delaware Valley Plants
Center City runs on a district energy steam loop, the regional hospital and university campuses run central boiler plants, and the refining and chemical operations downriver generate steam at pressures where feedwater quality stops being a preference and becomes a design constraint. All of them pull makeup water carrying hardness, alkalinity, and silica. Left in place, that chemistry scales tube surfaces, steals heat transfer efficiency, and eventually forces an outage nobody scheduled.
Lime softening removes it economically at volumes where membranes and ion exchange alone get expensive. Adding lime raises pH so carbonate hardness precipitates as calcium carbonate and magnesium comes out as magnesium hydroxide, with soda ash brought in where noncarbonate hardness also has to drop. Run hot, the same reaction pulls silica down alongside the hardness, which is why hot process softening remains standard ahead of high pressure boilers.
What a softening basin actually needs from upstream is reagent that does not wander. Tekkem slakers weigh out quicklime and water on load cells and keep the slaking reaction in its proper temperature band, with slurry strength dialed in anywhere between one and thirty percent. Consistent lime in means a basin that settles predictably, sludge volumes that can be planned for, and effluent hardness an operator does not have to chase between rounds.
How Precision Dosing Works
Flue Gas Desulfurization and Acid Gas Control Reagent Feed for Regional Combustion Sources
Sulfur control in this region looks different than it does in coal country. The large waste to energy facilities serving the Delaware Valley, including the plant in Chester and the operation up in Bucks County, inject hydrated lime to strip sulfur dioxide and hydrogen chloride out of combustion gas before the baghouse. Refinery fluid catalytic cracking units and sulfur recovery trains carry their own controls. Philadelphia runs its own local air pollution authority through the health department, so a source inside city limits, one in Delaware County under PA DEP, and one across the river under NJDEP each answer to a different desk under EPA Region 3.
In a wet system the gas stream meets a lime or limestone slurry inside the absorber and the sulfur leaves as calcium sulfite and gypsum. Semi dry and injection based designs skip the slurry entirely, metering powdered hydrated lime into the duct ahead of the fabric filter. Whichever route a site takes, inconsistent reagent turns into removal efficiency nobody can explain to a regulator and sorbent that gets purchased without ever doing work.
Feed preparation is what RDP builds. Batching by weight keeps slurry strength at the value the absorber was specified around, and one platform serves quicklime and hydrated lime alike with no mechanical changes, which is worth something to any site reconsidering its control technology or its reagent contract. On a continuous emissions monitoring system, reagent drift is visible to everyone, so it is usually the cheapest thing left to fix.
Hydrated Lime Feed Details
Lime Handling, Dust Control, and Storage on Constrained Urban Industrial Sites
A refinery in Trainer and a plant wedged into a South Philadelphia block face the same reagent logistics problem from opposite directions. Lime arrives by bulk truck, has to be stored somewhere, and has to move from that silo into the process without coating the surrounding area in dust or seizing up on a humid August afternoon. On a tight urban parcel with neighbors close by, the handling side of a lime system frequently drives more of the layout than the treatment side does.
RDP designs the equipment around that reality rather than treating it as somebody else's scope. Lime characteristics vary lot to lot and supplier to supplier, and a purchasing decision made on price can change slaking behavior the week it arrives. Systems that compensate automatically keep that variability from reaching the process.
Mechanical layout carries as much of the load as the controls. Only one moving part sits inside the reaction tank, with bearings and seals mounted outside where dust and steam cannot reach them. Around 65 plants report lower maintenance hours and spend since converting, which counts for most at sites that have no realistic window to take the system down.
Hear From Plant Operators
Automated Dosing and Recordkeeping for Permit Driven Operations
Everything on this page eventually gets reported to somebody. Discharge monitoring reports go to the pretreatment authority or the state, emissions data flows off continuous monitors to the air agency, and a capital project that cannot demonstrate performance becomes an enforcement conversation instead of a success story. The equipment has to produce the record, not just the result.
RDP control platforms integrate into existing SCADA so reagent feed data lands in the same historian as everything else operations already tracks. The Tekkem operating system takes continuous input from load cells and a thermocouple and adjusts the lime to water ratio on its own as process water temperature shifts with the season and as lime properties change.
Design, fabrication, and controls programming all happen under one roof, so what shows up on site was shaped around that plant instead of adapted to it after the fact. Our engineers sit down with operations staff, corporate capital teams, and whichever design firm is carrying the project, from early scoping through startup and across the service life that follows.
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Give us the application, your flow rates, and the permit limits in play, and we will come back with a straight answer on whether our equipment is the right fit.
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