The Northstar Chemical team includes experienced experts, familiar with all water treatment equipment.
Northstar has offerings to ensure your facility operates at peak efficiency for the lowest possible risk, manpower, and cost.
Our water treatment professionals can provide equipment, which handles all water treatment needs. We provide services and equipment for:
- Treating and polishing incoming raw water
- Removing impurities throughout your water treatment process
- Feeding, monitoring, and controlling your chemical program
Water Monitoring Systems
Northstar Chemical’s water technology and monitoring systems allow our customers to analyze and manage their water treatment systems with ease and efficiency.
Northstar has created and managed our very own line of advanced water control equipment, including our proprietary coagulant controller, which works seamlessly with our WebAdvantage Software. Our experienced team of engineers and service representatives will help you achieve your water treatment goals while reducing costs and maintaining your assets.
Our comprehensive software and hardware equipment solutions allows our customers and their Northstar field reps to remotely monitor and control their water treatment. Our all-inclusive approach will ensure your water treatment process properly maintains its performance levels. Our system will also send alerts to alarm conditions.
Our customers have access to an integrated package of controls, communication devices, and sensors, which we can customize for a wide range of capabilities. We carefully engineer each package to:
- Monitor various properties critical to your operations
- Reduce your operator’s time
- Optimize your operational cost
- Increase your system’s reliability
Trace-Star® Chemical Controller
Northstar uses the Trace-Star® controller as an automated, versatile water treatment system for optimizing boiler, cooling, and wastewater management programs. By leveraging a wide range of sensor and communication technologies, Trace-Star® is one of the most flexible, accurate, and secure monitoring platforms available.
Our system can simultaneously monitor and control pH, conductivity, total suspended solids, ORP, treatment chemistry, feed pump operation, as well as any other parameters you want at your fingertips.
The Trace-Star® controller can help your facility:
- Optimize treatment levels with advanced monitoring and control technologies
- Reduce manpower requirements by automating testing and control of key system parameters
- Decrease total cost of operations by minimizing water and chemical usage
- Improve response time to system upsets
Other benefits include:
- Multiple mounting options to increase flexibility
- Multiple control outputs
- Versatile communications options (Modbus/BacNet, ethernet, cellular router, Wi-Fi)
- Data logging capabilities
- Many options for standard inputs
The Trace-Star® controller for cooling tower and boiler applications also offers a tag probe option. This allows for continuous, on-line measurements of your treatment levels and ensures your process uses the right chemistry in the right amount—all the time.
The Trace-Star® controller for wastewater chemistry applications couples with an advanced, self-adjusting PID control system. This combination enables the system to monitor the influent and effluent quality of your wastewater process.
This system will continuously adjust the feed to the lowest amount of chemistry necessary to reach your target results for effluent and dewatered solids performance.
This proprietary wastewater chemistry controller provides:
- Significant reductions in manpower requirements
- Continuous control of your treatment levels
- The ability to target a precise level of effluent clarity
- Prevention of chemical overfeed and high treatment costs
- On-line monitoring and adjustment of treatment chemistry and other inputs
Advanced Water Treatment Monitoring: WebAdvantage
Northstar partners with Advantage Controls so that customers receive the collective wisdom of experienced, Northstar water treatment professionals with real-time data. Our team can optimize the effectiveness of the chemical treatment program at your facility.
Our WebAdvantage water management platform enables monitoring and control of your water treatment programs by providing:
- Data management
- Analytics
- Reporting
- Real-time guidance
This cloud-based software helps our customers make real-time, data-driven decisions to:
- Protect system assets
- Minimize water, chemical, and energy costs
- Meet sustainability goals
Compatible with most industry-standard equipment setups, WebAdvantage is easy to integrate with your existing equipment. Our team can also work with you to create and install a custom equipment package best-suited to your facility’s needs.
Chemical Feed Equipment
Feeding chemistry safely and effectively to your treatment process requires pumps, drawdown cylinders, dilution, and many other parts and pieces that are reliable and affordable. The best chemistry in the world is worthless if the systems feeding it can’t dose it properly 100% of the time.
Throughout our 25 years of service to our customers, Northstar has time-tested its line of feed equipment for durability and effectiveness.
We can assemble customer feed systems that integrate with our automation systems as well as your ethernet and building automation programs. Whatever parts, big or small, that your system requires—Northstar can provide the equipment you need.
Pre-Treatment Equipment
Northstar Chemical has world-class knowledge and expertise when it comes to pretreatment for boiler makeup and other industrial processes.
While most pretreatment equipment is commonly used at the front of the plant, water reuse projects are becoming more common and stretching the current capabilities of these units.
Northstar is an industry expert in innovative antiscalants, and other chemicals designed to fit your needs in all areas of your pretreatment system. We can work with you to optimize your current pretreatment system and provide consultation on system improvements and new system designs.
Pretreatment can include any form of filtration, whether conventional media or membrane, reverse osmosis (RO), and any form of ion exchange.
A pretreatment program from your Northstar field engineer may include:
- Filter aid treatment
- Microbiological control
- Chemicals for dechlorination or controlling scale
- Cleaners of any sort
- Any combination of the above
Suspended Solids Filtration
There are several types of filtration units designed for the removal of suspended solids, colloids, and organics on the market today.
Many filters tailor the media to fit the plant’s specific needs. This includes but is not limited to sand filters, multimedia filters, greensand iron-removal filters, and activated carbon filters.
Many of these filters require industrial water treatment chemicals to meet the desired effluent specifications. A few of the ways chemical water treatment can boost a media filter’s efficiency, include:
- Leach for microbiological control or iron oxidation
- Filter aids to improve the Silt Density Index (SDI) results on a filter’s effluent
- Cleaners for all forms of filtration
Newer technologies involve robust membrane filtration systems designed to handle very high solids loadings. Microfiltration (MF), membrane bioreactors (MBR), and ultrafiltration (UF) systems are becoming very popular in industrial water systems, especially for water reuse projects. These systems require a more intensive chemical program compared to conventional media filtration.
Utilizing either a MF or UF prior to an RO system significantly improves RO performance and membrane longevity while reducing the frequency of RO cleanings. Chemicals such as bleach, citric acid, caustic, and specialty cleaners are key to operating a successful MF or UF system.
Northstar representatives are well-versed in the technology and chemical demands of these systems and can help troubleshoot issues as well as recommend efficiency improvements.
Ion Exchange Processes & Water Softeners
Water softeners remove calcium and magnesium ions from makeup water. If a system does not properly treat and monitor these hardness ions, the ions can lead to the forming of insoluble compounds. The compounds will precipitate within downstream systems, such as industrial boilers and other process systems. This can cause boiler efficiency loss and damage in addition to potentially harming the plant’s process systems.
Demineralization
Another area where Northstar can assist is demineralization. Obtaining highly pure water is paramount for the safe and efficient operation of high-pressure boilers and processes requiring high-quality makeup. Monitoring these systems is essential for meeting a facility’s water cost goals.
Reverse Osmosis
Industrial RO systems are treating new and more complex water streams every day. Common water sources for RO systems include city and well water as well as surface waters such as lakes and rivers.
RO Water Treatment
With water scarcity posing a problem for many industries, RO systems are being used for all kinds of water reuse projects. These makeup sources include cooling tower blowdown, coal ash ponds, and all ranges of wastewater from plants across all industries.
As the makeup water sources have become more complex, a well-designed pretreatment system and chemical program are even more important than ever for effectively operating an RO system. To keep the RO system online and functioning properly, the system must:
- Maintain an acceptable SDI
- Have the best antiscalant
- Implement a normalization trending program
Northstar pretreatment experts are well-versed in these systems and can design a full chemical treatment and monitoring program. They can review design metrics around the RO and any upstream filtration and work with you to improve the overall efficiency of your pretreatment system.
Water Pretreatment Programs
The key to the operation of any downstream equipment, whether ion exchange or membrane filtration, is a well-designed pretreatment system. Pretreatment system needs can vary greatly depending on a variety of factors.
Before a pretreatment chemical program is recommended, your Northstar field engineer will first take the time to understand all the industrial equipment associated with your system.
After a short review process, Northstar can provide chemical recommendations for the following:
- Bleach or other biocides for microbiological control
- The correct chemistry for the oxidation required, such as iron precipitation
- Inorganic and organic filter aids to boost a filter’s efficiency
- Cleaners containing surfactants to clean media filters and resin
- Dechlorination chemicals to protect any downstream resin or RO membrane
- Antiscalants to protect RO membranes from any potential scaling event
- High-pH and low-pH specialty cleaners for MF, MBR, UF, and RO membranes
- Neutralizing and pH adjustment chemicals
Makeup water treatment is essential for optimizing the operation of any filtration or membrane system. A pretreatment program from your Northstar representative can be custom designed to fit your plant’s needs.
Along with a full chemical program, Northstar Chemical has full normalization trending and remote monitoring capabilities within our Trace-Star® and WebAdvantage systems.
Wastewater Treatment Equipment
Wastewater treatment can be a difficult process to monitor and control accurately. Many systems, due to poor equalization or wide swings in raw water quality, require around-the-clock supervision and adjustments by operators.
Industrial wastewater can be especially hard on treatment equipment and the proper design, installation, and operation of this equipment is crucial to achieving success in your wastewater operations.
Northstar Chemical offers a complete line of treatment equipment including, but not limited to:
- Diffused air flotation systems
- Inclined plate clarifiers
- Dewatering systems
- Belt presses
- Screw presses
- Filter presses and precoat systems
- Centrifuges
- Influent solids screening
- Parabolic screens
- Rotating drum screens
- Cartridge and bag filters
- Polymer make-down, aging, and feed systems
- Dry product feed systems
- Coagulant and polymer feed automation
Your Northstar field engineer, along with the rest of our technical staff, can help you design, build, and/or optimize your ideal treatment process. Our experienced team will help you build the right water treatment process from the start.
We will also provide ongoing service to ensure your system continues to operate at peak efficiency. For all the water treatment equipment needs of your facility, Northstar Chemical can recommend and supply off-the-shelf and customer manufactured systems and integrate them seamlessly with your operations.
Trust Northstar to protect your valuable facility assets with feed, control, monitoring, and treatment equipment that offers the latest technology available while being reliable and affordable.
