Letter 10751

Removal of Boron in wastewater from 12 mg/l to 1.0 mg/l 

I am interested in the technology, capital cost as well as average annual cost for reducing Boron in an industrial wastewater from 12 mg/l to a level below 1.0 mg/l and a flow rate of 100,000 gallons per day.

Any information...

or manufacturer's information would be appreciated.

Thank You,

William M [last name purged for privacy due to age of posting], P.E.
- Ranch Santa Margarita, USA

^-- I am a supporting advertiser and want to reach this inquirer privately.

Editor's note: If any reader wants to publicly offer GENERIC info on boron removal we will be happy to print it. As for manufacturer's info, our supporting advertisers should respond with William in private.

You can achieve this removal by some specialty ion exchange resins with the N-methylglucamine functional group. Capacity will vary according to background salts, and is most dependent on flow rate. Resins can be regenerated by sulfuric acid. Hope this helps.

Juzer Jangbarwala
wastewater treatment systems - Santa Fe Springs, CA, USA

Ion exchange will work, using the selective resins mentioned in a previous response, but the capacity is very low: approximately 2 ounces of boron per cubic foot of resin at exhaustion. It may be your best method, but it is a rather expensive resin, and you would exhaust 80-120 cubic feet of resin per day.

One of the problems will be what to do with the large waste volume that this would generate. There are a couple of references that suggest that the sulfuric acid can be reused several times and saturated with crystallization of the boric acid, but the last time I tried to find anyone doing this, I was unsuccessful.

If this is wastewater, another possibility is to recycle this water, by Ion exchange if the Total Dissolved Solids concentration is low, or by HERO reverse osmosis if the TDS concentration is high. Conventional RO systems will not have good boron rejection, but at a high operating pH, the rejection is > 90%. You would still have a boron containing waste, but in a much more concentrated and lower volume.

Lyle Kirman
Kinetico Inc. - Cleveland, OH

I am a student on attachment with a company which specializes in manufacturing and which has its own waste water treatment facility. We aim at reducing boron to less than 5 ppm. we plan to use chemical methods to treat the same. Currently we are using Aluminum Sulfate, Polymer and Lime and though the results are good,high boron water greater than 15 ppm cannot be treated on its own. Thus we plan to use a new procedure which uses Hydrogen Peroxide and an 'Accelerator'.

What is an accelerator? could anyone please help me? also any other chemical solutions for a 90% reduction in boron by methods other than RO or any physical processes.

Avinash Chandramouli
student - Singapore

----
Ed. note: Readers who wish to answer, please do so. Readers who are looking for answers please see our FAQ on waste water treatments for boron. It lists the more than 20 threads on this topic that are on line here.

I want to post a question or inquiry of my own.

 

I want to answer or follow-up on this question publicly (in non-commercial fashion).