Full Description

Water softening can help alleviate problems causedby hard water, such as hindering of launderingprocesses and scale buildup in hot water pipes andheaters. This article summarizes the fundamentalaspects of softening and explains the effect of improvingthe process with the use of seed crystals.Heterogenous nucleation, which refers to precipitationon the surface of nucleating agents such as seedcrystals, lowers the free energy of crystallization inprecipitative water softening processes. To determinethe importance of the amount of surface area providedby the nucleating agent, the authors added different-sized calcium carbonate seed crystals to varioushard waters during precipitative softening with causticsoda. As these results demonstrated, the surfacearea of the seed crystals, rather than the total mass,proved the key factor in the optimization of the softeningprocess. Includes 35 references, tables, figures.

Product Details

Edition: Vol. 97 - No. 12 Published: 12/01/2005 Number of Pages: 10 File Size: 1 file , 320 KB