Application of a Sulfur Removal Hydrometallurgical Process in a Lead-Acid Battery Recycling Plant in Costa Rica

This study presents the implementation of a desulphurization process for lead recycling under different chemical and physical conditions using pyro-metallurgical processes. Desulphurization was done using a hydrometallurgical process using sodium carbonate as a desulphurization agent and different lead-bearing loads compositions. Waste characterization included: SO2 concentrations in the stack emissions, total lead content in the furnace ash, the total lead content in the slag, and the toxicity characteristic leaching procedure (TCLP). A significant reduction in SO2 emissions was achieved (~55% reduction) where mean SO2 concentrations changed from 2193 ± 135 ppm to 1006 ± 62 ppm after the implementation of the modified processes. The desulfurized lead paste (i.e. the metallic fraction lead of the battery) of the modified process exhibited an improvement in the concentration of the lead in the TCLP test, with an average value of 1.5 ppm which is below US EPA limit of 5 ppm. The traditional process TCLP mean value for the TCLP was 54.2 ppm. The total lead content in the bag house ashes shows not significant variations, when comparing the desulphurization (67.6% m/m) and non-desulphurization process (64.9% m/m). The total lead mean content in the slag was higher in the desulphurization process (2.49% m/m) than the traditional process (1.91% m/m). Overall, the implementation of a new desulphurization method would potentially increase the operation costs in 10.3%. At the light of these results, a combination of hydrometallurgical and pyro-metallurgical processes in the recycling of lead-acid batteries can be used to reduce the environmental impact of these industries but would increase the operational costs of small lead recyclers.

Disaster Risk Management Through the Design Safe Cyberinfrastructure

Design Safe addresses the challenges of supporting integrative data-driven research in natural hazards engineering.It is an end-to-end data management,communications,and analysis platform where users collect,generate,analyze,curate,and publish large data sets from a variety of sources,including experiments,simulations,field research,and post-disaster reconnaissance.DesignSafe achieves key objectives through:(1)integration with high performance and cloud-computing resources to support the computational needs of the regional risk assessment community;(2)the possibility to curate and publish diverse data structures emphasizing relationships and understandability;and(3)facilitation of real time communications during natural hazards events and disasters for data and information sharing.The resultant services and tools shorten data cycles for resiliency evaluation,risk modeling validation,and forensic studies.This article illustrates salient features of the cyberinfrastructure.It summarizes its design principles,architecture,and functionalities.The focus is on case studies to show the impact of Design Safe on the disaster risk community.The Next Generation Liquefaction project collects and standardizes case histories of earthquake-induced soil liquefaction into a relational database—Design Safe—to permit users to interact with the data.Researchers can correlate in Design Safe building dynamic characteristics based on data from building sensors,with observed damage based on ground motion measurements.Reconnaissance groups upload,curate,and publish wind,seismic,and coastal damage data they gather during field reconnaissance missions,so these datasets are available shortly after a disaster.As a part of the education and community outreach efforts of Design Safe,training materials and collaboration space are also offered to the disaster risk management community.

IoT sensor-based BIM system for smart safety barriers of hazardous energy in petrochemical construction

The accidental release of hazardous energy is one of the causes of construction site accidents.This risk is considerably increased during petrochemical plant construction because the project itself is complex in terms of process,equipment,and environment.In addition,a general construction safety barrier hardly isolates and controls site hazardous energy effectively.Thus,this study proposes an Internet of Things(IoT)sensor-based building information modeling(BIM)system,which can be regarded as a new smart barrier design method for hazardous energy in petrochemical construction.In this system,BIM is used to support the identification of on-site hazardous energy,whereas IoT is used to collect the location of on-site personnel in real time.A hazardous energy isolation rule is defined to enable the system to generate a smart barrier on the web terminal window,thereby ensuring the safety of on-site person.This system has been applied to a large-scale construction project in Sinopec for one year and accumulated substantial practical data,which supported the idea about the application of sensor and BIM technology in construction.The related effects of the system on hazardous energy management are also presented in this work.