Heinz Ludwig
Technical Advisor, Fichtner Consultants
The desal wild card: any technology, any continent, Heinz will work with it.
Heinz studied at Essen, Germany's industrial heartland, before working in process engineering at Frankfurt and Hamburg. In 1970, he became head of process engineering at Hager & Elsässer, where he contributed to bringing polyamide hollow fibre RO and cellulose acetate RO / UF membrane tubular modules to market, and made a specialism of combining RO, UF and ion exhange for electronic or pharmaceutical utlra-pure water needs.
In 1982, Heinz joined Fichtner Consultants, eventually becoming Director of Fichtner Water Technology. His involvement in the majority of all their desal operations over 24 years – he continues to be a technical adviser – included MSF, RO, MED, dual-purpose and hybrid plants over at least three continents, and several plant that continue to hold size records of one kind or another. He scaled back to an advisory position in 2006.
The free beer each evening was some consolation to me for this burden. After the test run I was allowed to take some 0.5-1% beer with me, labeled and not to be distinguished from normal beer. I invited some friends to a Bavarian evening with beer, pretzels and radishes. We were in a very good mood.
However, when most of them had nearly emptied ten bottles, a discussion started that Bavarian beer was obviously rather weak and one could clearly consume more of it than the regional beer.
Landmark plants:
- range from the Al Khobar II and Taweelah thermal plants (which broke various size records) to the Singapore, Perth and Sydney SWRO plants, and the Fujairah and Ras Azzour hybrids.