Study of progressive freeze concentration and eutectic freeze crystallization technique for salt recovery

Abstract

In this industrial era, salt recovery from seawater has become an important issue from the environment perspective. Few freezing technologies have been proposed as capable way to separate the salt from the seawater because of the energy used in the previous technologies is higher. A study of Progressive Freeze Concentration (PFC) and Eutectic Freeze Concentration (EFC) method have been carrying out and further investigated on their performance in recovering the salt. For the PFC method, pure water crystallizes into crystal and the concentrate is left behind as in liquid form while for the EFC method, both ice crystals and salt crystallize at the same time when the initial concentration of water salt mixture is exactly the same as eutectic concentration. In EFC, salt sinks to the bottom while ice floats at the top of the crystallizer and both are separated by gravity separation. Effective partition constant and solute recovery are calculated to evaluate the efficiency of PFC and EFC. In this study, the PFC method has shown an effective partition constant of 0.28 and recovered solute of 0.88 g of sodium chloride per 1 g of initial sodium chloride while for EFC method, effective partition constant and solute recovery obtained are 0.59 and 0.66. Overall, both techniques are applicable for the seawater desalination process.