Zero Liquid Discharge for Desulfurization Wastewater 

【Project Overview】

Guided by the "Dual Carbon" goals, coal-fired power plants, as core entities in energy supply, face an urgent need for green, low-carbon transformation. Desulfurization wastewater, one of the most challenging waste streams to treat in power plants, has become a key bottleneck hindering the achievement of "Zero Liquid Discharge" due to its high TDS and complex composition (primarily sodium chloride and sulfate, containing heavy metals, fluorides, etc.). Traditional desulfurization wastewater treatment processes often suffer from high energy consumption, unstable operation, and low resource recovery rates, struggling to meet industry transition demands.

The Create project features a comprehensive process chain of "Pretreatment + Ultrafiltration + Chelating Resin + Electrodialysis + Reverse Osmosis + Flue Gas Evaporation," pioneering a "One Electrodialysis Unit in Operation, One on Standby" operational mode. With a single treatment capacity of 20 m³/h per unit, it achieves technological breakthroughs even when treating complex influent with TDS of 45,000 mg/L, setting a benchmark for desulfurization wastewater treatment in the power industry.

【Project Highlights】

• Efficient & Targeted Process Combination Solving Treatment Challenges
  The project innovatively adopts a combined process of "Dual-Membrane Method (Ultrafiltration + RO) + Electro-Driven Membranes." This pathway, tailored to the high salinity, hardness, and corrosivity of desulfurization wastewater, forms a precise treatment scheme with step-wise purification and cascading concentration. It effectively overcomes the bottlenecks of traditional processes, such as scaling propensity and low recovery rates, ensuring highly efficient and stable system operation.
• Industry-Leading Concentration Efficiency, Achieving Ultimate Waste Volume Reduction
  The system ultimately concentrates the brine stream to ≥18% salinity (TDS ≥ 180,000 mg/L), reaching an industry-leading concentration level. This signifies extreme volume reduction of the wastewater, significantly lowering the scale and energy consumption of subsequent evaporation/crystallization or solidification units, and establishing an economically viable foundation for plant-wide ZLD. 
• Key Role of Electro-Driven Membrane Technology Enhancing System Reliability
  As the core concentration unit, the electro-driven membrane utilizes electrical field force to drive ion migration, requiring no phase change and consuming less energy than thermal concentration. Its greater tolerance for scaling potential in the feed water makes it a key technological guarantee for achieving high-fold concentration and ensuring long-term, continuous system operation.
• A Win-Win for Cost-Effectiveness & Environmental Compliance
  The process not only ensures effluent meets reuse or discharge standards, achieving environmental compliance, but also significantly reduces operating costs and water environmental risks for the enterprise through efficient water recovery and waste stream minimization. This achieves synergistic enhancement of economic and environmental benefits.