Applying Nanofiltration to Decrease Energy Consumption and Sensitivity toward Feed Composition Fluctuations in Salt Production

Abstract

The only currently active industrial-scale plant that uses coal mine brines, located in Czerwionka-Leszczyny, uses ZOD (Zakład Odsalania Dębieńsko, the name of the plant’s former owner) technology, based on mechanical vapor compression evaporators. The plant produces evaporated salt that meets the specifications for edible salt; however, the technology is highly energy-consuming. The presented work focuses on the modeling of ZOD technology if applied to the water treatment of the ‘Ziemowit-650’ coal mine. Using the results of bench-scale investigation of brine nanofiltration and a mathematical model of ZOD technology based on Czerwionka-Leszczyny performance, the energy consumption per ton of produced salt was estimated for two cases: (1) ZOD technology treating the ‘Ziemowit-650’ brine and (2) ZOD technology treating the permeate of nanofiltration (NF) working on the ‘Ziemowit-650’ brine. The sensitivity of the system was investigated in the range of −10% to + 10% of Cl−, SO42−, Mg2+, and Ca2+ concentration, assuming that the sodium concentration also changes to meet the electroneutrality requirement. The results show that nanofiltration pretreatment not only decreases energy consumption but it also makes salt production less sensitive to fluctuations in feed water composition.