Water Softening for Mine Boiler.

How does a water softener work?

We call water "hard" if it contains a lot of calcium or magnesium dissolved in it.

• It can cause "scale" to form on the inside of pipes, Boilers and so on. The calcium and magnesium precipitate out of the water and stick to things. The scale doesn't conduct heat well and it also reduces the flow through pipes. Eventually, pipes can become completely clogged.
• The solution to hard water is either to filter the water by distillation or reverse osmosis to remove the calcium and magnesium, or to use a water softener. Filtration of this type is usually extremely expensive, so a water softener is usually a less costly solution.

The idea behind a water softener is simple. The calcium and magnesium ions in the water are replaced with sodium ions. Since sodium does not precipitate out in pipes the problems of hard water are eliminated. To do the ion replacement, the water runs through a bed of small plastic beads covered with sodium ions. As the water flows past the sodium ions, they swap places with the calcium and magnesium ions. Eventually, the beads contain nothing but calcium and magnesium and no sodium, and at this point they stop softening the water. It is then time to regenerate the beads.

Regeneration involves soaking the beads in a stream of sodium ions. Salt is sodium chloride, so the water softener mixes up a very strong brine solution and flushes it through the beads The strong brine displaces all of the calcium and magnesium that has built up in the beads and replaces it again with sodium. The remaining brine plus all of the calcium and magnesium is flushed out through a drain pipe.

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