Creating coagulants through the combined use of ash and brine

Creating coagulants through the combined use of ash and brine

Hao, Xiaodi (Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture)
Wang, Xiangyang (Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture)
Shi, Chen (Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture)
van Loosdrecht, Mark C.M. (TU Delft BT/Environmental Biotechnology; Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture)
Wu, Yuanyuan (Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture)

2022

Sludge incineration and seawater desalination are two approaches that can be used in the disposal of waste activated sludge (WAS) and for obtaining fresh water. As resource recovery from wastewater treatment and water purification is a topic of particular interest in these times, “water mining” has become a focus of research, with phosphate/P-recovery from WAS incineration ash, and extraction of useful elements from the brine of desalination being important steps in the pursuit of a circular/blue economy. However, P-recovery from ash involves removing metals, which need to be disposed of carefully, as does the brine collected. If cations in the ash and anions in the brine could be combined in order to produce coagulants/flocculants, a new circular model would be established. A preliminary experiment for this purpose has demonstrated that a liquid poly‑aluminum chloride (PAC) could be synthesized from the aluminum ion/Al³⁺ removed from the ash and the original brine. With this work, we synthesized the liquid PAC by a hydrothermal method, and the results from infrared spectrometer demonstrated that the synthesized PAC was similar to a commercial PAC. Moreover, the synthesized PAC was able to efficiently reduce the effluent turbidity of wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs), especially when compared with the commercial PAC. It is therefore important that research in this area be continued in order to improve the quality of synthesized coagulants and to produce different coagulants based on cations and anions in ash and brine.

Brine
Coagulants
Desalination
Phosphorus recovery
Removing metals
Sludge incineration

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:097afabf-c77e-49d5-a85e-f3e38b5a3647

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2022.157344

2023-07-01

0048-9697

Science of the Total Environment, 845

Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository 'You share, we take care!' - Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2022 Xiaodi Hao, Xiangyang Wang, Chen Shi, Mark C.M. van Loosdrecht, Yuanyuan Wu