Reduction of boron in water for use in agriculture

Abstract

Water requirements in food production and agroindustrial activities, as well as society, is a growing demand. Our country, Mexico, is one of the 80 countries with the most irrigation infrastructure in the world, ranks seventh, although environmental difficulties such as overexploitation of aquifers, salinity and pollution affect irrigation areas. Taking into account the increasing concentration of boron in surface and groundwater and the need to treat seawater, which contains large amounts of this element, it is important to develop effective technologies for the removal of boron. Unfortunately, there is no simple and economical method for this task. The great difficulty in selecting this method is the fact that boron appears in water in several numbers of chemical compounds and its concentration varies from environmental conditions from one site to another. Treating water with high concentrations of boron will allow this resource to be used in agricultural crops It will be possible to obtain a water treatment design, in which a chemical procedure is established to remove boron by precipitation in batches so that the cost of the treatment is economic, the second purpose will be to obtain a calculation memory to determine the concentration of Reagents to be used once the initial concentration of boron is known.