Technology
As a result of the in-depth experience of its founders, who each have in excess of 40 years in chemical process industries, with focused efforts over the past 25 years as K-Tech, the Company has developed a number of process application packages and approaches that can offer significant value-add opportunities for its Clients.
As an example, in the production of wet process phosphoric acid, elements such as uranium, rare earths, yttrium, vanadium, cadmium, fluorides, and silica are usually present in small quantities. The Company’s extraction technologies can treat large volumes of intermediate process streams like phosphoric acid in a continuous manner, and isolate and recover certain desired target elements in a highly concentrated low volume solution. This solution in turn can then be treated separately to produce one or more target elements as marketable products. The host phosphoric acid stream, minus the removed components, is returned to the originating plant and continues on in its normal processing sequence.
Variations of the Company’s technologies can also be used to remove small quantities of deleterious elements from product streams that will allow the main product to have considerably more usefulness and value, even if the removed impurities carry no extra value. Examples include the removal of iron, aluminum and magnesium (the so-called minor elements or ME) from phosphoric acid streams thus permitting the production of specification
downstream products such as diammonium phosphate (“DAP”), the major world traded phosphate fertilizer. Still other applications can be used to produce highly purified technical and food grade materials from a host intermediate product.
An example would include the production from impure wet phosphoric acid of a highly purified, completely water soluble monoammonium phosphate (“MAP”) for clear liquid fertilizer solutions, which has seen steady growth over the years.
A different application of the Company’s technology is in treating mixed salt solutions in large volumes to isolate and recover target salt combinations. This is particularly applicable to the potassium chemicals industry where K-Tech’s technology can be used for the production of such specialty products as potassium sulfate, potassium carbonate, potassium phosphates and potassium nitrate. Indeed, all of these materials have been produced commercially with the K-Tech ion exchange processing concepts.
Another area of major focus is the recovery and purification of difficult-to-separate strategic materials, such as tantalum/niobium; zirconium/hafnium; specific precious metal materials such as gold, platinum and palladium; rare earths (conventional and non-conventional sources); etc.