How to deal with excessive silica levels in secondary brine?
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Our company’s electrolyzers are zero-gap natural circulation electrolyzers manufactured by Beihua Machinery. Recent ICP analysis data from the D-170 unit show that the level of silica is continuously rising, and it has currently reached 9000 ppb. I would like to ask the experts how to handle this properly?
Our company plans to purchase light calcium carbonate to treat silica.
I guess you’re using concentrated brine, with more industrial salt added; there’s no good solution at the moment to reduce the silica level in the system.
At present, our company is conducting experiments and has not yet used light calcium carbonate in the system.
This post was last edited by qugd on 2020-11-19 at 13:14. Silica at around 10 ppm is easy to detect but difficult to remove in concentrated salt solutions. Since concentrated brine has a certain solubilizing effect on silica, which is otherwise insoluble in pure water, the flocculation and precipitation process during brine purification is very inefficient at removing the resulting silica sol, and its efficiency is far inferior to that of removing iron and aluminum.
Yes! It’s only possible to find a way to control it through the original salt
Use raw salt with a high calcium and magnesium content. Our company also encountered a similar situation before; adding calcium carbonate did not result in any significant improvement in ICP analysis ； However, the silicon ion level drops significantly after directly adding calcium ions (calcium oxide) and sodium carbonate; the original poster can conduct an experiment to see this (for experimental purposes only).
There is no effective method for removing silicon; for now, control can only be achieved by managing the raw salt and the water used for salt dissolution