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US 12,227,441 B2Granted
Mineral recovery enhanced desalination (MRED) process for desalination and recovery of commodity minerals
AssigneeUNM Rainforest Innovations
InventorsBruce Thomson, Kerry Howe, Ayush R Shahi, Sugam Tandukar
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Abstract
A novel process for treatment of low quality or brackish water that allows increased recovery of high quality water, recovers commodity minerals and reduces the volume of water and mass of solids that are disposed from the process.
Claims15
A process for treating brackish or saline water comprising, performing, in sequence, the unit operations of low pH degasification;
- high pH precipitation;
- ion exchange, nanofiltration, and desalination to produce high quality desalinated water;
- wherein
- commodity materials are selectively obtained from at least one of the high pH precipitation, ion exchange, and nanofiltration unit operations;
- wherein the commodity material comprises sodium chloride salt brine and using the sodium chloride salt brine to regenerate an ion exchange column in the ion exchange unit operation;
- and
- low pH de gasification occurs at a pH of less than 5;
- high pH precipitation occurs at a pH greater than 10.5;
- and
- high quality desalinated water is water with total dissolved solids (TDS) concentration of less than 500 mg/L.
7 more elements
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.