Re-Salt - Recycling of industrial process water

Summary

Nowadays water counts as a limited and valuable resource and the environmentally friendly recovery of process wastewater has to be considered as an indispensable issue. Re-salt (Recycling of industrial salt-laden process water) is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Researche (BMBF) with the government’s funding initiative WavE. This joint project is focusing on salt-laden pollutants from the chemical industry and aims at the elimination of harmful organic molecules and the re-concentration of sodium chloride in the recovered process water. This approach would allow a recirculation of the remaining sodium chloride into the chlor-alkali electrolysis, the most important industrial process to produce chlorine. However, as a part of Re-salt the DFI focusses on the removal of organic-based pollutants in the effluents. Since it is known that electrosorption can be a powerful tool for wastewater treatment the idea to accelerate and enhance adsorption with polarization of a conductive carbon-based adsorber seemed likely. Furthermore, this concept allows a regeneration of the adsorber bed due to reversion of polarity. To realize this concept filter-press-cell consisting off a membrane, two graphite sheets as electrical contacts and two chambers filled with adsorber was designed. A range of parameters, pH-dependency, electrolyte and potential, will be tested to realize an economic adsoption/desorption process.

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NaWaM-WavE