Brine Treatment for Desalination

Brine is a water solution with a very high concentration of salt or sodium chloride. The term also applies to solutions with other salts. The most common applications known to consumers are highway deicing or as refrigerant in the refrigeration industries.

However, the brine generated as waste in industrial processes is a difficult problem that industries are facing.  Its treatment poses numerous difficulties and purification of saline wastewater is not very effective by means of the technology usually employed:   physicochemical or biologic treatments etc.

Different alternatives, such as membrane separation technologies, do not provide the desired results in the case of brine treatment. This is mainly due to the high amount of rejects generated and the inconvenience caused by the presence of organic contaminants in filtration membrane.

Therefore, vacuum evaporators have proven to be, by far, the most successful technology for the treatment of this type of wastewater. On the one hand, this system enables the highest degree of concentration possible, up to the point of salt drying up completely; and on the other, it generated purified effluents, which are compliant with usual discharge limits, because of their extremely low conductivity and organic contaminant contents.

The management of the concentrate is the most compromised aspect of the treatment. The aim is to minimize it as much as possible in the most cost-effective way, as the final destination will be a waste manager unit (if it is a highly concentrated brine) or a landfill, if salt precipitation happens to occur.

In any case, vacuum evaporators already have a proven track record for effectively treating brines generated by the following industries:

• Food industry:

– Hams and prepared meat products
– Meats, canned fish and shellfish,  fish farms
– Pickles, olives and other pickled foods
– Lupines, pine nuts, almonds, and other canned vegetables
– Animal offal

• Chemical and pharmaceutical industry

• Leather tanning industry

• General industry: rejects from reverse osmosis

• General industry: eluates from decalcifier regeneration

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Taxonomy

• Wastewater Treatment
• Industrial Water Treatment
• Industrial Water Managment
• Zero Discharge
• Desalination
• Waste Management