BORON EXTRACTION FROM AQUEOUS MEDIUM USING A DESIGNED DEEP EUTECTIC SOLVENT AND THE REGENERATION OF THE USED SOLVENT

Boron element is one of the vital elements for human health-boosting, industrial applications, and plant growth. In fact, if the boron concentration in an aqueous stream would go beyond the permissible limit it should be removed and recovered. Therefore, boron extraction is targeted as a preventive measure to satisfy the standards of drinking water in desalination plants and protect the plant crops. Moreover, for production purposes, boron is recovered from industrial wastewater including nuclear wastewater streams to be reused in further processes. Based on previous experimental work of our group, the removal of boron is performed through liquid-liquid extraction (LLE) using deep eutectic solvents (DES), which are green solvents that have many desirable features like low volatility, simplicity of synthesis, biodegradability, and cost - efficiency. In this work, the hydrophobic deep eutectic solvent that consists of 2,2,4-Trimethyl-1,3-pentainediol (TMPD) and Decanol (Dec) is used as an extraction solvent to extract boron from aqueous medium at different operating conditions. The performance of the newly developed eutectic mixtures will be verified over various extraction operational parameters such as pH, A/O mass ratio and temperature. This will be accomplished through varying the investigated parameters simultaneously by applying the Design of Experiments (DoE) statistical methodology to observe the ‘sweet spot’ at which the targeted variables will have the maximum capacity of boron extraction. The optimization done takes into consideration the industrial and economical point of views in which the obtained Extraction Efficiency (EE) reached up to 93.1 ± 0.6 % and 91.4 ± 0.4 %. In addition, 97.9 ± 1.1 % of the boron loaded DES was regenerated using the back extraction method.