Nano Calcium Carbonate Production Utilizing Solvay-Process Industrial Wastewater and Carbon Dioxide

Abstract

nanoparticles are catching more attention due to their implementation as a filling material in a variety of fields. Nowadays, calcium carbonate nanoparticles have a large number of industrial applications replacing more expensive binders. Global warming and climate change, which are mainly caused by the increased concentration of carbon dioxide gas (CO2), turned to be a significant problem for our society. This research aims to develop an economic mineral carbonation process for the manufacture of nanoprecipitated calcium carbonate (NPCC), which can be considered also as an efficient way for the sequestration of CO2. The proposed research was divided into two stages, during the first stage a pure calcium chloride solution was carbonated, and the effect of different parameters (CO2 flow rate, ammonia amount, presence of additives, stirring rate, and ultrasonic waves) on the yield and the particle size of the produced particles was discussed. Then a synthetic Solvay wastewater sample was prepared and carbonated to study the effect of the presence of impurities on the particle size. The experimental results showed that increasing the amount of ammonia or the gas flow rate can affect the yield of the product while, increasing the stirring rate, the ammonia amount, or a suitable additive like glycerol have the effect to decrease the particle size. In the second stage, a process for ammonia recovery was modeled using Aspen Plus software v8.8 in order to make our process more economic.