Advanced equipment and automated processes: how Zapadnaya water treatment plant works / News / Moscow City Web Site

Nov 05, 2024

The Zapadnaya water treatment plant has turned 60 years old. It is the youngest of the four plants within the capital’s water supply system. Due to continuing innovation, the plant is now fitted with state-of-the-art technology. Its high-tech complex produces clean drinking water using advanced solutions (ozone sorption and membrane filtration).

Located in Solntsevo, Western Administrative District, the Zapadnaya plant covers an area of ​​approximately 100 hectares. It supplies the city with approximately one million cubic meters of drinking water per day, which is more than 30 per cent of the total supply from all water treatment plants in Moscow. The plant provides drinking water to over 40 southern and southwestern areas of Moscow as well as a number of cities in Moscow Region with a total population of approximately four million people. The megacity consumes almost three million cubic meters of water per day, or an average of about 130 liters per each Muscovite.

The Zapadnaya plant has the longest type 1 water pipelines. There are 10 of them in total, each 17 kilometers long. The plant’s equipment and solutions are world-class. Water treatment processes are fully automated: the equipment operates using unmanned technologies, and the plant is controlled by a single control center. It obtains up-to-date information, including water source monitoring data, process parameters of the structures, pumping stations and equipment, water quality data (water treatment stages and outflow).

Water quality is tested using advanced technology along the entire route from the water source to the consumer. More than 500 automatic analyzers are also installed at water treatment units and in the distribution network. 184 indicators are used to test water quality.

Since its first day of operation, October 7, 1964, the Zapadnaya water treatment plant has supplied the city with 27,127,813,790 cubic meters of water (115 volumes of the Mozhaiskoye reservoir). This would be enough for the entire world population for as long as a month, with water consumption at 110 liters per person per day. A water pipeline with a diameter of 1.4 thousand millimeters, containing this amount of water, would wind around the Earth’s equator 440 times.

Fueled by the rapid post-war growth of Moscow’s population and extensive residential development, the plant construction began in 1961. Experts started building the Mozhaisk Hydrounit in 1952 and the Ruzskoe and Ozerninskoe reservoirs in 1956–1958 to supply water to the capital.

Gradually, the Zapadnaya plant put innovative water treatment units into service. In 2006, it launched a unit that uses ozone treatment, activated carbon sorption and membrane filtration technologies. In 2011, an ozone treatment and activated carbon sorption unit was put into operation.

Moscow is a rapidly developing city; its new residential areas will need water and, therefore, more of the Zapadnaya water treatment plant.