Further evaporation and final treatment of process-water concentrates

The study is part of a longer-term effort aimed at developing a separate treatment process for evaporation-concentrates of paper-mill process waters. This article deals with research on the two key processing steps; namely, the further evaporation and the final treatment of the concentrates. In laboratory expenments, various feed waters, including several different TMP filtrates, were evaporated to high dry-solids contents. The condensates recovered in most experiments contained relatively small amounts of organic matter. The extent of vapourisation of organic acids, relative to water, increased somewhat with increase in dry-solids content. Two TMP concentrates from large-scale evaporation plants were further concentrated in a pilot. scale forced-circulation evaporator. Viscosity was the factor limiting the extent of concentration. Using an evaporation temperature of about 80°C, the maximum dry-solids contents achieved with the two different concentrates were about 45 wt% and about 60 wt%, respectively. Fouling of heat-transfer surfaces was observed with both concentrates. A techno-economic evaluation of final-treatment options for alkali-rich concentrates is under way. According to intermediate results, molten-phase combustion processes would not require support fuel once the dry-solids content of TMP concentrate exceeds about 50 wt%. The aim of future work is to optimise the overall treatment process.