Experimental study of industrial wastewater treatment by freezing

This work aims to study an industrial wastewater treatment process by melt crystallization on a cold wall. A binary solution of water/acetone was chosen as model effluent. A parametric study of the wastewater treatment process was performed by means of an experimental design. The process was conducted in a static mode and the impurity concentration in the ice was analyzed after each freezing cycle. The process required applying very precise conditions and the ice concentration mainly depended on the initial solution concentration and on the applied cooling rate. The ice microstructure was also characterized by optical microscopy in a cold chamber and gave insights into the mechanism of impurity incorporation: the liquid inclusions were localized under the form of solution pockets at low growth rate or between the polycrystals at higher growth rate.