Treatment for Boron

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Does anyone out there have experience handling treatment for Boron in waste water.

Regulations specify Boron to be less than 5 ppm before can be discharged to drain.

Currently the influent contains 200 ppm Boron. What is the best approach to reduce from 200 ppm to 5 ppm. Flow is 7 m3/h?

Much appreciated.

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10 Answers

  1. Dear Ramlan in my experience Boron is not so simple to treat.

    Before of all is interesting to identify the complete quality of the  wastewater, and so considering the different available treatment (preciptation, RO, resins, evapoconcentration..) identify the best process scheme of treatment.

    If your waste water  is characterized by, TSS, DCO, Metals, and others.. I think

    - first step must Be preciptation

    normally best condition for B preciptation are around pH 10-11 using Ca(OH)2 and MgCl2 (I found and test that Mg improve a lot the B removal, seems thorugt something like and adsorption on the precipitated - floc)

    in this case working on the dosing, contact time and chemical condition (depending on your wastewater composition and B compounds) you can remove about 60 -90% of the initial B.

    in the same time you remove a lot of others pollutant that normally are wrong for the next purification step

    - after precipitation and clarification I suggest a Sand filtration, and depending on your waste water any other pretreatment to prepare to RO (so AC filtration, UF, or others) any backwash or other downstream msut be sent back to the precipitation stage

    - RO  could be  final step (if your focus is to reach 5 ppm could  treated only a stream of it and after blend ).. normally by my experience with RO (there are dedicated membrane) you can reach value lower  than 5 ppm .. and regarding the salt rejection.. it must be recycled  to the precipitation stage ..

     

    if your B limit is lower than 0.5 - 1 ppm I think you need to add a final stage of resins.. also in this case resins regeneration liquid must be sent to precipitation stage or concentrated by evapoconcentration  or sent to external treatment plant 

     

    hope to be helpfull

    best regards

    ciao

  2. Dear Mr. Ramli,

    Our company has a boron selective resin, SIR-150, PDS attached.  Please provide us with your water analysis and we can check if our resin is a feasible option.  My email address is srock@resintech.com  All the best, Seth

  3. Don sarge and John Herring, you're are right, but precipitation with higher concentrations reduce always capital costs in longer terms

  4. Mr. Ramli, 

    It is difficult from what you described, but I would believe that the boron could be removed with ion exchange resin.  To be more definitive, I would need to review input chemical characterisitics, flow diagram with other treatment processes and your goal.  Good luck.  In general, Boron occurs in nature in its oxidized forms as boric acid and its salts. Boric acid is a very weak acid and acts much like silicate so it is difficult to remove from water. It has a very low selectivity for an anion exchange resin so resin capacity will be limited by the presence of other anions.

  5. As Mr. Sharp mentions the only way to effetely remove the Boron is precipitation and disposal in land fill. All other technologies will just concentrate Boron but you will still have disposal issue.

  6. You don't describe what processes you have already.  Each system needs to be dealt with on an individual basis.  Precipitation can take up to 2 hours using acid and lime.  There is a specific resin Amberlite IRA-73, which can polish Boron but the regeneration waste of that has to go somewhere.  

  7. I would recommend Lanxess MK 51 Datasheet attached, in UPW production we could reduce from 20 ppb to 20 ppt.

    Best Regards Dieter Hofmann

    1 Comment

    1. Of course, I totally forgot about the selective weak base anion resin, more of a Lewis base to selectively exchange with Lewis acid.

  8. Boron is not particularly well rejected by reverse osmosis, or forward osmosis, unless the feed conditions are correct (i.e. >9.5 pH), thus other ions that might fall out of solution in high pH water must first be conditioned out.  Ion exchange is not extremely efficient, although under the right conditions you will experience fair to good results.

    Possibly the best removal of boron is by total evaporation, so I would consider using vapor compression evaporator for the 7 cubic meter per hour flow you mention.  You will have to make arrangements to have the brine from your evaporator impounded, then haul it away, possibly to a deep injection well, or a salt lake where boron is already higher than in your brine.

  9. A full water analysis is required to choose the best technology. Competing ions need to be considered. Reverse osmosis and ion exchange can be used.

     

  10. Bonjour c'est très simple 

    Quand une molécule ou une présence chimique intervient dans un effluent d'eaux usées (j'espère que c'est le cas, car vous le décrivez pas) à un taux relatrivement élevé c'est qu'un industriel du bore rejette ses déchets dans les eaux usées. il faut donc comme toute source de pollution ne déterminer l'origine et forcer l'auteur à éliminer cette source de pollution 

    Hello it is very simple when a molecule or a chemical presence intervenes in a wastewater effluent (I hope this is the case, because you do not describe it) at a high relatrivement rate is that a boron industry rejects its waste in wastewater. It is therefore necessary as any source of pollution to determine the origin and to force the author to eliminate this source of pollution 

    1 Comment

    1. I'm not sure that forcing someone else to remove their boron in "very simple".  Locating the source might be challenging and a remedy would likely even be more difficult.