The ever-increasing need for high-quality drinking and process waters, and growing public awareness about possible contamination, drive efforts for the further development of automated control of water treatment plants. For example, membrane filtration processes and reverse osmosis in particular are generally regarded as a safe barrier for inorganic, organic, and microbial contamination. Yet, to ensure the final water quality and to increase the confidence of the end-user, intensive and preferably online monitoring should be further implemented as an early-warning tool to control membrane integrity and to prevent microbial regrowth in the distributing network. In this paper, we test the applicability of flow cytometry and cytometric fingerprinting for a full-scale water treatment plant. We demonstrate in a full-scale water treatment plant that flow cytometry can be used as online monitoring tool and that changes in water quality can be observed, which are not monitored by commonly used online quality parameters. Furthermore, we illustrate with ultrafiltration that process conditions impact the flow cytometric cell counts.

对高质量饮用水和工艺用水的不断增长的需求，以及公众对可能的污染的意识日益增强，推动了对水处理厂自动控制的进一步发展的努力。例如，膜过滤工艺尤其是反渗透通常被视为对无机，有机和微生物污染的安全屏障。然而，为了确保最终的水质并增加最终用户的信心，应进一步实施密集且最好是在线监测作为预警工具，以控制膜的完整性并防止分配网络中的微生物再生。在本文中，我们测试了流式细胞仪和细胞指纹图谱在大规模水处理厂中的适用性。我们在一家大型水处理厂证明，流式细胞仪可以用作在线监测工具，并且可以观察到水质的变化，而这些变化不能通过常用的在线质量参数进行监测。此外，我们用超滤说明了工艺条件会影响流式细胞仪细胞计数。