Recovery of Phosphoric acid from Ferrous Metals Processing Industry, P-Rec

Purpose and goal

During production of stainless steel parts with high demands on the surface, phosphoric acid is included as a so-called pickling acid. Phosphorus is one of the EU´s so-called critical materials and should be recycled. A system for recycling phosphoric acid was developed in EU project INSPIREWATER, which now will be demonstrated in full scale. The separation of metals from the phosphoric acid is achieved by the use of membrane filtration from MERCATUS and concentrated using evaporation from VILOKAN. Steel producer ALLEIMA in Sweden leads the project and IVL evaluates the results.

Expected effects and result

The project will demonstrate the possibility to replace new phosphoric pickling acid with recycled. In addition to the recycling itself, the process also reduces the concentration of phosphorus in the metal sludge in the wastewater treatment plant. This increases the possibility of recycling metals and fluorspar (fluorine). In addition to the build-up of know-how for advanced integrated recycling systems, the participating suppliers estimates that the solution is attractive on the international market, which provides good potential to increase the companies´ export share.

Planned approach and implementation

A demonstration facility will be built at Alleima and the project´s goal is to spread the results widely, which will benefit Swedish environmental technology nationally and internationally. The project will be run in two parallel tracks where one focuses on optimization, demonstration and evaluation and the other focuses on commercialization. The results from the demonstration are a prerequisite for commercialization. The commercialization part provides increased knowledge to the evaluation part.