Backed by a parent company with an extensive equipment line and the expertise to tackle the most difficult industrial water treatment challenges, WTR Engineering, LLC recently expanded its already impressive capabilities.
A wholly owned subsidiary of WesTech, WTR Engineering boasts more than a century of experience and considerable expertise in water filtration, resulting in the design and manufacture of multiple highly effective bar screens and screen rakes. Over time, the firm’s team of experts has consistently demonstrated the ability to quickly and clearly identify customers’ needs, help them determine optimal solutions, and provide the equipment customers need to implement those solutions. WTR’s recent provision of equipment for a Northern California fish hatchery perfectly illustrates that point.
The customer’s requirement was for a specific type of trash rake system designed to clear debris from a bar screen at a raw water intake located along a large creek, which provides water for the hatchery. The contractor handling the job called on WTR, purchasing its Talon Rake®, an overhead monorail-style bar-screen rake designed to capture logs, twigs, leaves, even discarded shopping carts and other waterborne debris that often gets trapped against the bar screen.
Among WTR’s top-notch project team members: Industry veterans Trent Gathright and Wesley Reetz, whose 80-plus years of combined experience in water filtration have involved researching, designing, manufacturing, rebuilding and installing screening plant equipment; and Ryan Holbrook, a highly effective project manager who has managed hundreds of similar initiatives.
Designed to be compatible with an existing bar screen, the Talon Rake is inherently adaptable to existing sites without civil modifications. It’s primary purpose is to prevent harmful debris from reaching a series of pumps that lay downstream and allowing water to flow freely through it. Those pumps deliver water to the fish hatchery, which the customer oversees to facilitate fish restocking.
“[The rake] has the capacity of picking up a small car,” explains Holbrook, noting that its capacity enables it to handle anything that the creek is capable of carrying along in its current and can remove upward of 80 cubic yards of debris per day.
The rake itself resembles a claw with a flat side that slides down the bar screen, closes around trapped debris, and pulls the debris out of the water. It then traverses the monorail and dumps the debris into a receptacle for easy removal. Thus, the Talon Rake both cleans and transports debris with ease.
Both WTR and its competitors could offer a rake that met the customer’s requirements. So what set WTR apart from other firms vying for the job? Quick delivery. WTR was able to deliver the Talon Rake 60 percent sooner than its competitors could show up with its own equipment. This time- and budget-saving benefit also came with a team of experienced professionals who could quickly identify and efficiently address unforeseen pitfalls a project such as this might experience.
Expert Engineering Delivers Customized Solutions
Every customer’s needs are unique. To meet this customer’s particular requirements, WTR was able to customize improvements to the standard Talon Rake’s implementation. For example, the customer’s specification required hydraulic cylinders to open and close the rake’s claw. The standard Talon Rake systems use mechanical means to do this, thus eliminating hydraulics in the water, and housing those mechanics in the carriage, which makes helps keep the equipment cleaner and easier to maintain compared with that of hydraulic systems.
The customer’s specification also required festoon cables to power the motors, sensors and hydraulics. The standard Talon Rake uses a monorail electrification system with electronics located in the monorail. Festoon cables often blow in the wind and, as an unintended result, can wrap themselves around the monorail. The Talon Rake’s standard implementation prevents this problem from occurring.
“Once the project started up, we advertised the benefits of our standard Talon Rake over the competition’s rake,” Holbrook says. “Mechanically speaking, it’s a much superior product because it doesn’t have the hydraulics or the festoon cables. We’ve built a better mousetrap.”
WTR’s team estimated that it would take the contractor about two weeks to commission the Talon Rake system, but installation went so smoothly that it took less than one.
While training the customer’s personnel to use and maintain the rake, the WTR team noted that the workers’ responses invariably proved favorable.
“All comments we received when we commissioned [the Talon Rake] were favorable,” Holbrook says. “We continually got people excited over the fact that the solution is no-nonsense. It’s very user friendly. They just hit the ‘Run’ button and it cleans and dumps.”
In addition to the one-button manual start, the Talon Rake also offers the ability to start the debris rake cycle via differential control, built-in timers or the plant distributed control systems (DCS). It also features a handheld wireless manual remote controller, a human-machine interface (HMI) touch screen with a programmable logic controller.
The results of the fish hatchery project prove that it is among the top multiple economical and effective systems protecting downstream equipment from waterborne debris. It’s proven and used in numerous industrial and municipal applications, including power plants and industrial raw water, canal and waterway protection, sewage treatment plants - virtually any other coarse water filtration application.
WTR offers Talon Rake screen rakes and bar screens in a variety of application-appropriate materials. These include galvanized steel for the fish hatchery; stainless steel and aluminum bronze for use in hazardous areas. Cutting-edge engineering, including 3D modeling, FEA, STAAD, and other advanced engineering tools, all help to verify fit, function and conformance to all industry standards and requirements.
The Talon Rake also allows for adding multiple rakes to the same monorail, making it as suitable for larger applications as it is for the fish hatchery’s smaller, single-rake system. Bottom line: WTR’s ability to customize the Talon Rake affords the company opportunities to meet a wide range of applications and specifications, thus allowing it to produce better products with shorter delivery times than those offered by competitors.