Fluorine removal and calcium fluoride recovery from rare-earth smelting wastewater using fluidized bed crystallization process

As a regulated pollutant, fluorine compounds affect the health of millions of people all over the world. Their removal using a fluidized bed reactor (FBR) through crystallization process is a new method. Instead of chemical precipitation, which produces large amounts of sludge-containing wastewater hard to recover and treat. In this work, FBR was applied to a typical rare-earth smelting wastewater containing fluorine. Influence of different seed materials, seed size, and seed amounts on the fluorine removal and calcium fluoride recovery in the FBR were studied. When silica sand was used as the seed crystal and the amounts reached 30g, the concentration of fluorine in the actual wastewater decreased to 8.2 mg L-1 or lower. The removal efficiency of fluorine and recovery ratio of calcium fluoride were obtained as 93.79% and 89.45%, respectively. The particle size of recovered calcium fluoride was about 1.5mm. The results show that FBR with silica sand as seed crystal is a feasible and economical method for removing fluorine and recovering calcium fluoride from rare-earth industrial wastewater.