Comparison of Freezing and Hydrate Formation Methods in Removing Chloride and Bromide Ions from Brine

Abstract

The growing population and enhanced industrial activities coupled with limitations on freshwater availability have led to efforts to desalinate salt water from the seas. Membrane and thermal technologies are the two commonly used for this purpose. In this study, the direct freezing and hydrate formation techniques were used for salt water desalination. Materials and Methods: Distilled water, sodium chloride, and sodium bromide were used as raw materials in the experiments. The experimental setup included a stationary reactor with two coaxial cylinders, in which ice crystals were deposited outside the cool inner cylinder to increase the salt concentration in the residual brine. An electrical conductivity instrument was used to measure sal removal. Results: Salt removal was shown to decrease with increasing salt concentration in the direct freeze method. A different trend was, however, observed in the hydrate formation method; salt removal was negligible at low concentrations in this method but increased at high concentrations before a constant value was reached. Overall, the hydrate formation recorded a higher salt removal efficiency than the other method. To investigate the effect of anion size on salt removal efficiency, experiments were carried out using NaCl and NaBr, which have the same cation but different anion sizes. Result showed that removal efficiency increased with increasing anion size. Conclusion: It was found that increasing ion radius leads to the lower likelihood of ion presence in the crystal lattice, thereby reducing salt removal efficiency. On the other hand, low concentrations of salt serve as site for the generation of cores, which naturally serve as removal accelerators.

Keywords

• Ion Separation
• Direct Freeze Method
• Hydrate Formation
• Static Reactor
• Brine