A New Freeze Concentration Process for Minimum Effluent Process in Bleached Pulp

This project researches freeze concentration as a primary volume reduction technology for bleaching plant effluents from paper-pulp mills before they are treated by expensive technologies, such as incineration, for the destruction of the adsorbable organic halogens. Previous laboratory studies show that freeze concentration has a greater than 99.5% purification efficiency for volatile, semivolatile, and nonprocess elements, or any other solute, thus producing pure ice that can be reused in the mill as water. The first section evaluates the anticipated regulatory and public pressures associated with implementing the technology; the remaining sections deal with the experimental results from a scaled-up freeze concentration process in a 100-liter pilot-plant at Tufts University. The results of laboratory scale experiments confirmed that the freeze concentration technology could be an efficient volume reduction technology for the above elements and for removing adsorbable organic hologens and or nonprocess elements from recycled water. They also provide the necessary data for designing and operating a larger pilot plant, and identify the technical problems encountered in the scale-up and the way they could be addressed in the larger scale plants. This project was originally planned to include the operation of a large pilot plant in the facilities of Swenson Process Equipment Inc., and a field test at a pulp mill, but the paper company withdrew its financial support for the field test. In place of a final economic evaluation after the field test, a preliminary evaluation based on the small pilot plant data predicts an economically reasonable freeze concentration process in the case of reduction of the bleaching-effluent flow to less than 5 m3/kkg pulp, a target anticipated in the near future