Lake International’s largest RO plant, USA
Lake International, a short-lived DuPont membrane licensee, produced this BWRO unit for Deep Rock Bottled Water in the Glendale suburb of Los Angeles. When this unit was built in 1971, seawater RO was still years away.
The Deep Rock BWRO plant, by Lake International. – Dave Laker
According to Dave Laker, this was the largest unit his company ever built. It was rated at 76 m3/d but, he says, delivered more like 114. 'They had bought another RO unit from someone else which didn’t work, so they just disconnected it, pushed it out into the street in front of their place and left it there. Then they came and bought from me.'
DuPont’s early licensing system involved very close relationships with licensees, and this particular design caught the fancy of its management. The vertical permeators, clearly visible in their aluminium pressure vessels, were particularly liked and this image hung in DuPont’s headquarters conference room for many years.