Selective Recovery of Tungsten from Industrial Wastewater via D630 Resin: Performance and Pilot-Scale Application

This study aims to recover tungsten from tungsten containing smelting wastewater using D630 ion exchange resin. Batch experiments were conducted to investigate the effects of resin dosage, initial adsorption pH value, temperature, and time on tungsten adsorption. The results showed that the resin had an adsorption rate of over 99% for tungsten under the condition of resin dosage of 2.5 g/L, pH value of 1.0–5.0, temperature of 30℃ and adsorption time of 240 min. The adsorption process conforms to the Langmuir model and follows pseudo first order kinetics. XPS and SEM–EDS analysis also confirmed the high adsorption performance of D630 resin for tungsten in wastewater. In order to investigate the adsorption performance of resin on tungsten in actual tungsten containing smelting wastewater, a pilot scale column adsorption–desorption experiment was conducted using 500 L of D630 resin. A total of 456 m 3 of tungsten containing wastewater was treated, and the tungsten adsorption rate reached 98.0% after approximately 440 m 3 of wastewater flow. When the resin has not reached saturation adsorption, the tungsten content in the effluent is less than 1 ppm. The saturated adsorption resin was desorbed with 12% NaOH to obtain 218.55 g/L tungsten rich solution.