Iris Publishers- Open access Journal of Engineering Sciences | Handling of Brine Effluent of Desalination Plant through Producing Chemicals

 

 

Authored by Mai Mubarak Al Saadi

Most of Gulf countries tend to operate Desalination plants in order to produce valid and fresh water for human being usage. Unfortunately, those plants discard huge tones of salts into sea and the concentrations of those salts are very high which can disturb the ecosystem in sea. In the addition these are mainly attributed to concentrate chemical discharges, which may impair coastal water quality and affect marine life. Brine is a solution of salt (usually sodium chloride) in water. Instead of dumping the brine into sea water as way of disposal. It is good to utilize the salt brine as raw material for producing different chemicals through electrolysis process. The process of electrolysis involves using an electric current and require a lot of electricity that is mainly produced by the electrical energy comes from a d.c. (direct current) battery or power pack supply. In the experiment power pack supply was used (15V, 0.48A for 5 hours) in order to produce 1 liter of sodium hydroxide and 1 liter of hydrochloric acid. Moreover, there were other products such as sodium hypochlorite and chlorine gas which had been used to produce iron (I) chloride and Hydrogen gas was collected in balloon.

Desalination plants tended to treat sea water in order to have fresh water through desalination process which involves removing the salts like sodium chloride, Calcium and Magnesium chloride or sulphates and other salts from water, so they could supply the public and private sectors with their demands of water. Desalination plants over the world produce about 5000 million m3/year of water [1]. In addition, most of the desalination plants are combined with power plants for power production [2,3] supply to the customers like what is happening with Sohar and Baraka desalination plants. However, there are more specific effects related to desalination plants such as impingement of marine organisms due to the intake of seawater and the greenhouse gases (GHG) emission due to a considerable energy demand of fossil fuel [4-7]. Furthermore, reject brine discharged to the sea has the ability to change the salinity, alkalinity and the temperature averages of the seawater and can cause change to marine environment. Desalination process has many byproducts like salt brine and the salinity of this solution is above 5 % .

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