Aim

 

The overall project objective is to establish a robust basis for decision making (CAPEX, OPEX, LCA, technical feasibility) for the implementation of salt and water recovery processes on a production scale.

The project consortium pursues the vision of using salt-containing industrial water streams as completely as possible, thus relieving natural water resources.

Tasks for the reuse of salt-containing industrial water streams differ significantly with regard to the origin of the water, concentration level and ionic composition of the salts or secondary components. It is not to be expected that comprehensive treatment will be possible with a single technology. In RIKovery, the potentials of four innovative technologies are to be systematically investigated and the promising areas of application in each case are to be worked out. The overall project objective is to establish a sound basis for decision-making (CAPEX, OPEX, LCA, technical feasibility) for the implementation of salt and water recovery processes on a production scale. The project consortium has identified six industrially relevant applications covering the main discharges (polymer chemistry, specialty chemistry, potash industry) and differing significantly in terms of requirements and complexity, so that overall meaningful and widely transferable project results are expected.

An ecologically and economically viable recycling of saline waters faces in particular the following challenges of monitoring the treatment quality. For the reuse of salts and waters for subsequent processes, specific parameters often have to be observed in order to be able to guarantee quality assurance and operational safety. In addition to primary parameters (e.g. salt content of the brine), secondary parameters (e.g. content of special organic compounds) can be decisive. The state of the art is the laboratory quantification of identified constituents. This is to be extended by introducing online-capable process monitoring as well as quality assurance for previously unknown ingredients. New developments in the field of digitalization offer previously untapped opportunities for automated and intelligent data evaluation using existing analytical modules.