Brine

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

Treatment of industrial waste water

Abstract: A method is disclosed for processing industrial waste waters and, in particular, blow down water from thermal electric plants. The water is processed to concentrate the salts contained therein and to obtain a concentrated brine which can then be passed to a thermal evaporator and/or solar evaporation ponds. The water is processed by the addition of magnesium hydroxide and carbon dioxide in amounts sufficient to precipitate the calcium as calcium carbonate, thereby obtaining a water reduced in calcium content and increased in magnesium content from the industrial waste water. The treated water is processed to recover a purified water from a brine, preferably by reverse osmosis. Calcium hydroxide is added to the brine generated by the reverse osmosis process in an amount sufficient to precipitate magnesium hydroxide therefrom which can be recycled to supply the magnesium hydroxide used in pre-treatment of the water prior to the reverse osmosis process. A clarified brine is recovered from the magnesium hydroxide precipitation step and may then be naturally or thermally evaporated to produce a saturated slurry of salt solids. This slurry can then be further reduced to dryness by solar evaporation.

Potential of brackish water and brine for energy generation by salinity gradient power-reverse electrodialysis (SGP-RE)

Abstract: In the present work, a salinity gradient power-reverse electrodialysis (SGP-RE) unit was tested for the production of electrical energy by exploiting the chemical potential of real brackish water and exhaust brine from a solar pond. A cross-flow SGP-RE module (REDstack B.V.), equipped with AEM-80045 and CEM-80050 membranes specifically developed by Fujifilm Manufacturing Europe B.V. within the EU-funded project REAPOWER (“Reverse Electrodialysis Alternative Power Production”), was able to generate a maximum power density (expressed in W m−2 membrane pair – MP) of 3.04 W m−2 MP when operated with pure NaCl aqueous solutions (0.1 M in low concentration compartment – LCC, 5 M in high concentration compartment – HCC) at 20 °C and at a recirculation rate of 20 L h−1. However, a drastic reduction to 1.13 W m−2 (−63%) was observed when feeding the SGP-RE unit with artificial multi-ion solutions mimicking real brackish water and exhaust brine. Further experimental activity allowed to identify Mg2+ ion as responsible for the significant increase in stack resistance and consequent depletion in SGP-RE performance. Therefore, specific softening treatments of the real solutions should be considered in order to maintain the process efficiency at practical level.

Analysis of Membrane Distillation Crystallization System for High Salinity Brine Treatment with Zero Discharge Using Aspen Flowsheet Simulation

Abstract: An environmentally friendly membrane distillation crystallization (MDC) system is proposed to treat high salinity reverse osmosis (RO) brine with zero discharge. The raw brine from RO desalination plants is concentrated in direct contact MD to produce pure water, and the concentrate is then crystallized to produce solid salts without secondary disposal. A comprehensive analysis on the MDC system has been performed by Aspen flowsheet simulation with a user customized MD model, which was verified by our previous experiments. Simulation results reveal that the total energy consumption is negligibly changed by integration of a crystallization unit into the system, as over 97.8% of the energy was consumed by the heater of the MD subsystem. Higher inlet temperatures of both the feed and permeate streams in the MD module can improve the thermal efficiency. The introduction of a heat recovery unit in the MDC system, to recover the heat in the permeate for feed preheating, can increase the gain output ratio (GOR) by 28%. Moreover, it is shown that in a hollow fiber MD module, the permeate yield is a linear function of the length-to-radius ratio of the membrane module, and a longer MD module can reduce the specific energy consumption. A relatively high feed flow rate is preferred to avoid the potential problem of crystal blockage in the MD module.