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www.marinelink.com MN43could be combined to remove or kill organisms from ships ballast water. Hyde engineers brought more than 20 years experience with ballast tank sediment management (Hyde Mud Remover) and industrial wastewater filtration and wastewater treatment systems to this project. Hyde?s experience with various filtration techniques eventually produced a UV disinfection system that was practical, safe, and an environmentally sound method to treat ballast water. Simply designed, safe, and reliable, the efficient, automatic backflushing filter is used to remove sediment and larger plankton, and a powerful UV disin- fection system destroys or inactivates smaller organisms and bacteria. Hyde?s early efforts included delivery of five prototype treatment systems, utilizing cyclonic separation and low pressure UV, on board vessels in 2000 and 2001. As the IMO BWM convention began to take shape, Hyde recog- nized that the performance and reliability of the treatment components needed to be improved. They also knew that equipment size would be critical, not only for the retrofit bluewater market, but for smaller hulls with even tighter cubic dimensions.By 2002, Hyde had completed development of a two step treatment process of stacked-disk depth filtration and medium pressure UV treatment which was delivered and installed on the M/S Coral Princess in 2003. This Hyde GUARDIAN system was put into service and became the first to be accepted into USCG STEP and in April 2009 became one of the first systems to achieve IMO Type Approval. PROVEN TRACK RECORDAs one of the first commercially available and fully approved treatment systems, Hyde began to receive orders for GUARDIAN systems primarily for new construction projects and for a wide range of vessel types and sizes. Today, Hyde has orders for over 175 treatment units on vessels with ballast pump capacities ranging from 50 to 5,500 cubic meters per hour. With that kind of scalabili- ty, Hyde is in a unique position to offer approved systems for smaller vessels. Hyde recognized this need when approached by the Dutch biological research team about fitting the system to R/V Pelagia, a 66 meter multipurpose research vessel. The research team had been impressed by what they saw, particularly the reliability of the self clean- ing filters, during IMO G8 testing under extremely chal- lenging conditions at the NIOZ test facility, and specified the Hyde Guardian to be purchased and installed on their Hyde will soon deliver a BWTsystem for retrofit on the National Park Service Vessel, ?Ranger III?MN#3 (32-49):MN 2011 Layouts 3/2/2012 10:25 AM Page 43