Preparation and Characteristics of Polyaluminium Chloride by Utilizing Fluorine-Containing Waste Acidic Mother Liquid from Clay-Brine Synthetic Cryolite Process

Abstract

Clay-brine process employing activated clay, NaCl, HCl, and HF as raw materials is the primarily advanced technology to synthesize cryolite in the present industrial grade. However, plenty of byproducts of fluorine-containing waste HCl at the concentration of about 10%~12% could not be utilized comprehensively and are even hazardous to the environment. This work proposed a new two-step technology to prepare inorganic polymer flocculants polyaluminium chloride (PAC) from synthetic cryolite mother liquor. Many specific factors such as the variety of aluminide source, reaction temperature and time, reagent ratio, and manner of alkaline addition were taken into consideration and their influences on the performances of produced PAC were discussed. It was found that synthetic cryolite mother liquor could react with bauxite and calcium aluminate directly to prepare cheap PAC, with plenty amount of water insoluble CaF2 and CaSiF6 produced as well. However, once HCl was introduced into synthetic cryolite mother liquor as well as by utilizing bauxite as aluminide source and sodium aluminate as adjusting basicity agent, the resultant PAC would dissolve out higher amount of aluminum while producing little amount of water insoluble materials. The coagulation behavior of the specially produced PAC could even match the industrial grade PAC conforming to national standard.