Abstract:
After the water scarcity of 2014, the National Water Agency of Brazil (ANA), aiming to preserve the water stocks of reservoirs of the Paraíba do Sul basin, authorized, in March 2015, a reduction of 190 to 110 m³/h in the flow of the São Francisco Canal. The change caused the aggravation of the effects of intrusion of the salt wedge of Sepetiba Bay in the said channel, increasing the conductivity values, which impacted the operations of the steel complex of Ternium, because the seawater came to enter in the raw water harvesting systems. With the objective of circumventing the problem, the company decided to implement a reverse osmosis plant in order to adapt the industrial water conductivity to the parameters of the technical specifications of the demineralized water plant. The present work describes the optimization of the said plant to the production of demineralized water, which also resulted in the reduction of the number of regenerations of the ion exchange resins, the consumption of chemical products, as well as the reuse of the saline reject generated in the process of Osmosis (Reuse Project).