Special Nickel Removal Adsorbent Passes Sinopec Procurement System Review

Nickel, nickel alloys, and nickel compounds are widely used in industrial production, with most nickel used in the production of stainless steel, non-ferrous metals, and corrosion-resistant alloy materials. There is also a portion of nickel used to prepare catalysts for various reactions, as well as nickel based rechargeable batteries. During the production of nickel containing products, a large amount of nickel containing wastewater is generated, which is difficult to degrade into harmless substances in the natural environment. If directly discharged, it not only seriously pollutes the environment but also causes resource waste.

At present, the treatment technologies for nickel containing wastewater generally include chemical precipitation, biological method, membrane separation method, electrochemical method, ion exchange method, etc. Although chemical precipitation method and biological method are simple to operate and have low maintenance costs in the later stage, their treatment depth is insufficient, and they cannot recycle nickel resources; Although membrane separation and electrochemical methods can achieve a removal rate of over 95% for nickel, their high electrode oxidation, membrane contamination, and high maintenance costs hinder further large-scale applications. Compared with these methods, ion exchange method not only has significant advantages in processing cost and depth, but also is incomparable to other technologies in terms of energy conservation and emission reduction.

Unlike ordinary cation exchange resins and chelating resins, our company's developed special nickel removal adsorbent has extremely high selectivity for nickel ions and nickel complexes in wastewater, and the nickel content in the effluent can be reduced to 0.1mg/L. Our company has developed a special resin and supporting treatment process for the wastewater containing nickel citrate catalyst from Sinopec. The nickel in the wastewater can be treated from around 1000mg/L to 0.05mg/L. The effluent containing citric acid can be directly reused in production, and the desorbed nickel can be recovered. This project has been highly recognized by Sinopec and has passed the procurement system review. It is expected to complete the procurement by the end of the year.

The process flow is as follows:

Raw water (left), effluent (right)