Magnetic treatment of industrial water. Silica activation

H. Niewodniczański Institute of Nuclear Physics, Radzikowskiego 152, 31-342 Kraków, Poland

Corresponding author: maria.balanda@ifj.edu.pl

Received: 24 April 2001
Revised: 18 October 2001
Accepted: 13 December 2001
Published online: 15 April 2002

Abstract

The paper presents two large-scale observations of magnetic treatment of industrial water, aimed at investigating changes in the formation of deposits. First, a four-month experiment is described with two identical 25 kW heat exchangers, where in one case the inlet water was treated by a magneto-hydrodynamic method. Deposits recovered from both exchangers were analyzed chemically, by X-ray diffraction, infrared spectroscopy and PIXE. The amount of deposit for untreated water, composed mostly of calcite, increased exponentially with temperature reaching 20 g/m of tube at the warm end of the heat exchanger. The mass of the deposit for magnetically treated water did not depend on temperature and was only ca. 0.5 g/m of tube. It was composed of mainly noncrystalline silica-rich material. Further results were obtained from the practical installation at three blocks of a 1 GW power plant. The soft, amorphous deposit for magnetically treated water had a specific surface area of 80 m²/g and an infrared spectrum similar to that of a silicate hydrogel. Therefore, it appeared that, as a result of the passage through the magnetic device, crystallization of carbonates in water was blocked due to initiation of another, competitive process. This process is the activation of the colloidal silica, which will adsorb calcium, magnesium or other metal ions and then precipitate from the solution as the coagulated agglomerate. The most probable mechanism responsible for silica activation is a Lorentz-force induced deformation of the diffuse layer leading to the increased counterion concentration in the adsorption layer of the negatively charged silica.