Waste minimisation through recovery of salt and water from a hypersaline brine

This paper focuses on applying Eutectic Freeze Crystallisation technology to a hypersaline, multi-salt brine with trace quantities of base and precious metals. The salient results show that the crystallisation process can be manipulated using seed crystals to selectively crystallise Na2SO4 center dot 10H(2)O over ice over specific temperature regions. Both ice and Na2SO4 center dot 10H(2)O products were recovered with low contamination by impurities. This contamination was further reduced with a washing protocol. The salt crystals showed traces of Se and HCO3, which possibly adsorbed onto the surface of the crystal. More importantly, the results showed a 76% reduction in the mass of the hypersaline brine.