I am looking for a softening method for High TDS Water. I have a well water with TDS=6000 ppm and we need to decrease hardness before desalination. I found Purolite SSTC104 from PRSM software will effective but the software alerts that Na and Cl concentration is a little higher than limit.
Have any one similar experience for high tds water softening with resin?
High TDS (Total Dissolved Solids) water requires a specific resin for softening. Ion exchange resins, often strong acid cation exchange resins, are commonly used. These resins exchange hardness ions (e.g., calcium, magnesium) for sodium ions, effectively softening the water. The resin beads need periodic regeneration with brine (a concentrated salt solution) to maintain their softening capacity.
We re-purify any kind and flow of municipal / industrial wastewater and natural non-potable or seawater into potable with zero pollutant emissions, 95% efficiency and low operating costs warranting early ROI.
If you were interested to preserve your well and watershed, please send us your brackish water quality data and flow demand.
Your issue has 2 overriding conditions before you can address how to best answer:
1) what is the total flow of water you will treat and
2) what is the total hardness and alkalinity of the 6000 TDS water?
These 2 situations will determine what is most economical to do over time. What is necessary to understand is the desalination process you reference and intend to use after softening.
With this level of hardness, your best 1st step will be to use lime softening as it is the most cost effective method there is to reduce total hardness especially if you do not wish to increase sodium levels or deal with a large volume of waste regenerant brine. After the lime softening, you can use a micro filter and then follow that with 2 stage RO.
This is the process being used to recover cooling tower blowdown water and process waters from many manufacturing processes that have waters many times higher in concentration of sodium. chlorides and sulfates to the one you have (18,000 TDS for example). Recovery rates may approach 90%.
You will not want to use any Ion exchange process. The amount of waste brine you will generate will be very large. It is also 1960 technology. Our company does not sell any of this equipment. Our clients use it and we have helped many of them upgrade from their old technology to modern systems.
Our method in water desalination is thermal method. In this way, we first convert unconventional water into steam, with new energies that increase the humidity percentage of that space to above 50%, and then, by water generators, it is converted into suitable water.
I suggest you consider adsorbents if you have not tried it before. Natural occurring adsorbents like bentonite might be able to reduce such because already you also had issue with na and Cl which if I were to take you to ultrafiltration membrane was not gonna help because monovalents like sodium can't be filtered by ultrafiltration unless a hybrid system
I think it not easy to reduce the hardness in presence of NaCl as this compound is used for regeneration of the purilite resin itself. So it is better to use the desalination method directly to reduce the TDS of the well water. Just remember to add some acid to reduce the pH of the raw water and antiscalant reagent.