A study on treatment technology for antimony in mine drainage with tightened effluent standard in Japan

摘要

Antimony is one of the substances on which an effluent standard may be set in Japan in thefuture. Therefore the development of an efficient and low cost treatment technology forantimony in mine drainage is desired to be developed. In this study, experiments on thecoagulation method and the adsorption method to apply to mine drainage were carried out,and various coagulants and adsorbents were compared to know the efficiency and capacity.The results revealed that, although ferric chloride is the best coagulant in inorganic coagulants,a large quantity is required to achieve sufficient removal compared to the Sb content, and theSb(V) is difficult to remove practically even if reduction reagent is applied. Furthermore, ferric iron based adsorbent is recommended for the adsorption method from thepoint of adsorption capacity. However, the Sb adsorption capacity per volume of adsorbent isnot enough compared to the Fe amount in the coagulant required in the coagulation method.Therefore, combination of the coagulation method and adsorption method is proposed tocomplement the disadvantages of each method. This combination method is to applycoagulation with iron chloride at the first step, and to absorb Sb with iron based adsorbent atthe second step.