Treatment of acidic wastewater from vanadium production
Abstract
Vanadium and its compounds, such as pentoxide, are toxic and poisonous to the environment and humans. Vanadium is one of the most important elements in modern global industrial applications: up to 90 % is used as an alloying element in metallurgy, and it is also used in oil production, chemical power supplies, automotive, aerospace, defense and other industries. Increased resource consumption leads to an increase in the volume of industrial acid waste. In the process of producing one ton of vanadium, more than 100 m3 of acidic vanadium-containing wastewater is generated with a sulfuric acid content of 20 kg/m3 and vanadium 0.6 kg/m3. Ion exchange membranes are widely used in modern water treatment technologies and wastewater recycling processes. Electrodialysis with bipolar ion exchange membranes is used in processes for the recovery of acids and bases from salt wastewater. In this work, three schemes for electrodialysis processing of acidic vanadium-containing wastewater using laboratory cells were investigated. All studies were carried out on real wastewater from a Russian metallurgical enterprise for the production of vanadium. It has been shown that during direct electrodialysis processing without preliminary pretreatment, significant sedimentation occurs on the membranes. The most effective process is the preliminary precipitation of multivalent metals from wastewater with alkali, followed by the use of electrodialysis with bipolar membranes. This scheme was studied on a laboratory setup with an electrodialysis cell with 5 triple chambers and a working area of each ion exchange membrane of 5x20 cm2. The experiment was carried out at a current density of 1-3 A/dm2. It has been shown that the use of this process makes it possible to isolate heavy metals in the form of hydroxides during their precipitation with alkali, return sulfuric acid with a concentration of 2.5-3.5% to the technological cycle, obtain an alkali for the precipitation of metals and return purified water to the technological process. Thus, a scheme of a reagent-free technology for processing wastewater from vanadium production has been developed with the return of purified water, sulfuric acid, vanadium, and other valuable components, which can significantly reduce the environmental load.
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References
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