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.
Published by Terry Scheurman, President at Applied Specialties, Inc.
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.