Recoflo ion exchange technology

摘要

Recoflo ion exchange technology utilizes fine mesh resin beads, a fully packed resin bed, and counter-current regeneration. These unique features help to improve exchange kinetics, reduce regenerant consumption, and increase the concentration ofstrip solutions. Commercially, Recoflo technology has been extensively used in the following areas: the separation of strong mineral acids from dissolved metal salts, the purification, removal and recycle of dissolved metals in the surface finishingindustries, and the production of high purity water.In the mining and metallurgical industries Recoflo ion exchange systems have been installed to teat a copper refinery bleed stream at Falconbridge's Kidd Creek plant and to treat a nickel and cobalt bearing ammonium sulfate effluent stream at anotherprimary metal producer's facility. In the first application an APU Recoflo system is used to separate the sulfuric acid at 200g/L from the dissolved copper and nickel sulfate salts at 80 g/L. The absorbed sulfuric acid is recovered from the resin byelution with water and is then returned to the refinery electrolyte circuit. In the second application a chelating ion exchange resin is used to remove nickel and cobalt at 0.01-3.0 g/L from process streams containing 120 - 240 g/L ammonium sulfate. ThisRecoflo system has been designed to reduce the nickel and cobalt levels to 0.001 - 0.002 g/L while recovering cobalt and nickel at concentrations up to 30 g/L and 15 g/L respectively. Case studies for both these metallurgical applications and otherRecoflo processes are presented in this paper.