Hydrometallurgy & water chemistry, built in
Metal precipitation, scale, Eh-pH redox and complexation — the electrolyte chemistry an OLI licence charges for, driving a real flowsheet unit op.
Selective hydroxide precipitation
Dose an aqueous metal-bearing stream to a target pH and read off which metals drop as hydroxide sludge — iron and aluminium out at pH ~4, nickel and zinc at pH ~9 — the classic staged neutralization circuit, on CRC-cited solubility products.
Geochemical & oilfield scale
Barite, celestine, gypsum, calcite, siderite and fluorite precipitate from the same Ksp table when their ions meet — the produced-water and cooling-water scale-management screen, validated against published mineral solubilities.
Eh-pH redox speciation
A Nernst/Pourbaix solve distributes each element across its oxidation states at a given solution potential — so iron is solved from Eh (oxidise it and it drops as ferric Fe(OH)3 at low pH while ferrous stays dissolved), the real oxidation-precipitation iron-removal step.
Metal complexation
Ammine, cyanide and chloride complexes keep a metal dissolved where a free-ion model would precipitate it — ammoniacal Cu/Ni leaching, gold cyanidation — from cumulative Smith-Martell stability constants, coupled straight into the precipitation solve.
Ion-specific activity (Pitzer)
A Pitzer ion-interaction model gives ion-specific mean activity coefficients through concentrated brine — the step up from a generic Debye-Hückel default — verified against the cited Hamer & Wu NaCl dataset through 6 molal.
A solvable precipitator unit op
This chemistry isn't just a calculator — it drives a real `precipitator` node you drop on the canvas, wire to a thickener, and solve in a flowsheet, so a whole neutralization or scale-removal circuit converges as one model.
Worked circuits, one click away
Three solved flowsheets you can open, run and edit — a staged lime-neutralization circuit, an oilfield scale-removal train, and a full battery-recycling hydromet line from leach to battery-grade lithium.
Why this is different
In a legacy stack the electrolyte thermodynamics live behind a separate, expensive add-on, run apart from the process model. Here the precipitation, redox, complexation and activity chemistry share one data model with the simulator, so a neutralization or scale circuit is an ordinary flowsheet — dose a pH, oxidise a stream, add a thickener — that converges and conserves every metal atom, not a side calculation you copy numbers out of.
Honest by design
- ✓The aqueous chemistry is cited, screening-grade equilibrium: CRC pKsp solubility products, CRC standard reduction potentials (Nernst/Pourbaix), Smith-Martell complex stability constants, and Pitzer parameters verified against Hamer & Wu (1972).
- ✓Precipitation is solved at a specified pH (lime/caustic dosed to a setpoint, the way a real circuit runs) — not a fully self-consistent pH-from-hydrolysis, and the solution volume is a dilute-liquor estimate from the water flow.
- ✓This is not a licensed OLI/ecoinvent electrolyte databank of thousands of regressed ion pairs — it's a curated set of the common brine, leach-liquor and scale electrolytes, each pinned to a real cited source rather than an unverified extrapolation.
- ✓The deterministic solver produces every concentration, extent and stream; this layer applies the cited equilibrium chemistry — it never invents a process number.
From leach liquor to clarified water in one model
Open the thermo tools on any aqueous stream for a hydroxide-precipitation, redox or complexation screen — or drop a precipitator on the canvas and solve the whole circuit.
Try it free