Brine

About: Brine is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 6542 publications have been published within this topic receiving 76741 citations.

An experimental study of brine drainage and convection in Young Sea ice

Abstract: In a series of experiments using a 1.6-mm-thick freezing tank, thin sections of salt water ice were grown which exhibit the same drainage features as natural sea ice. The tank design permitted photographs to be taken, while thermocouples mounted in the tank walls recorded the temperature profiles within the ice. Convection was observed in both the skeletal layer and in the brine channels by the flow of dyed brine. Flow in the skeletal layer was cusplike in appearance, consisting of narrow downflow regions separated by broad upflow regions. Above the skeletal layer, several brine channels were also usually present in the ice, and convective overturning occurred in these channels. The convection caused temperature fluctuations of 0.05°C, which calculations show increase the vertical heat flux by 1%. The brine drainage channels, which were usually sloped 30° to 60° to the horizontal, always had isotherms tilted from 0° to 13° in the same direction. The brine channels move both horizontally and vertically through the ice by melting their lower walls and freezing on the upper walls. An analysis based on the heat flux due to brine channel convection shows that convection can drive these wall movements. Our observations suggest that most of the brine movement in the channels is caused by recirculation of water from below the ice. On a small scale we also observed the formation of brine pockets from brine tubes.

Recovery of Lithium from Geothermal Brine with Lithium–Aluminum Layered Double Hydroxide Chloride Sorbents

Abstract: We report a three-stage bench-scale column extraction process to selectively extract lithium chloride from geothermal brine. The goal of this research is to develop materials and processing technologies to improve the economics of lithium extraction and production from naturally occurring geothermal and other brines for energy storage applications. A novel sorbent, lithium aluminum layered double hydroxide chloride (LDH), is synthesized and characterized with X-ray powder diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), and thermogravimetric analysis. Each cycle of the column extraction process consists of three steps: (1) loading the sorbent with lithium chloride from brine; (2) intermediate washing to remove unwanted ions; (3) final washing for unloading the lithium chloride ions. Our experimental analysis of eluate vs feed concentrations of Li and competing ions demonstrates that our optimized sorbents can achieve a recovery efficiency of ∼9...

Molecular simulation of carbon dioxide, brine, and clay mineral interactions and determination of contact angles.

Abstract: Capture and subsequent geologic storage of CO2 in deep brine reservoirs plays a significant role in plans to reduce atmospheric carbon emission and resulting global climate change. The interaction of CO2 and brine species with mineral surfaces controls the ultimate fate of injected CO2 at the nanoscale via geochemistry, at the pore-scale via capillary trapping, and at the field-scale via relative permeability. We used large-scale molecular dynamics simulations to study the behavior of supercritical CO2 and aqueous fluids on both the hydrophilic and hydrophobic basal surfaces of kaolinite, a common clay mineral. In the presence of a bulk aqueous phase, supercritical CO2 forms a nonwetting droplet above the hydrophilic surface of kaolinite. This CO2 droplet is separated from the mineral surface by distinct layers of water, which prevent the CO2 droplet from interacting directly with the mineral surface. Conversely, both CO2 and H2O molecules interact directly with the hydrophobic surface of kaolinite. In th...