Zabuye Salt Lake solar pond in Tibet, China: Construction and operational experience
Zabuye Salt Lake solar pond in Tibet, China: Construction and operational experience
Weinong Huang 0 1
Recommended Citation
0 College of Marine Science and Engineering , Tianjin University of Science and Technology , China
1 Tibet Zabuye High-Tech Lithium Industry Company, Ltd. , Lhasa , China
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Zabuye Salt Lake Solar Pond in Tibet, China: Construction
and Operational Experience
Weinong Huang1,2, Xuekui Wang1, Zhinan Sun1, Zhen Nie2,3 & Zuoliang Sha1
1College of Marine Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Science & Technology, Tianjin 300457, China; 2Tibet Zabuye High-Tech Lithium
Industry Company Ltd., Lhasa 850000, China; 3 Institute of Mineral Resources, Chinese Academy of Geological Sciences, Beijing 100037, China; 4Key
Laboratory of the research of Saline Lake Resources and Environment, Chinese Academy of Geological Science, Beijing 100037, China
Corresponding Author:
Sha Zuoliang
College of Marine Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Science & Technology, Tianjin 300457, China
E-mail:
We describe the construction of the Zabuye Salt Lake solar
pond and our experience during its operation. The salinity
gradient was experimentally determined in the pond, which
has a surface area of about 3588 m2, at different operation
conditions and modes of operation. The method for
establishing a salinity and temperature gradient can save
large amounts of fresh water during the establishment of a
temperature and salinity gradient in a solar pond. A
technology to control solar pond operation was developed
on the basis of our experimental results and is now being
used to operate the pond.
INTRODUCTION
The structure and basic properties of solar ponds have been
studied in China since about 1977
(Xu & Li 1983)
.
Experiments have been performed in a wide geographical
area (Figure 1) including Zhengzhou, GanSu, BeiJing,
GuangZhou, GuangXi, and other sites
(Song et al. 1984;
Meng & Zheng 1991; Zheng & Meng 1991; Wang et al.
1992; Li 1994, 1995)
. The mechanism of operation, the
heating regime, and the possible fields of application were
reported by Li (1989, 1995). These studies have shown that
solar ponds can be applied to supply heat to a marsh gas
pool used to produce methane gas from organic waste and
to aquaculture ponds. In practice, solar ponds have been
successfully applied in the production of Glauber’s salt in
XinJiang
(Yang et al. 1990; Ma et al. 1998; Ding et al.
1997; Ding 2002, 2003)
and in aquaculture during winter in
ShanDong
(Chao & Song 2003)
. Solar ponds have also
been successfully used for the production of lithium
carbonate in Tibet since 2002
(Luo 2003a, 2003b)
.
Zabuye Salt Lake is located in central Tibet (Figure 1),
about 1050 km from Zabuye in the direction of Lhasa, at an
altitude of 4421 m. The air in this area is very dry. The lake
brine is hydrochemically unique, forming a comparatively
complex and special mineral assemblage characterized by
alkaline minerals rich in lithium, boron, potassium, and
sodium carbonate. The lake brine stores a huge amount of
lithium carbonate in the form of the recently named mineral
zabuyelite (Li2CO3) (Zheng et al. 1989). The average
annual temperature is about 2.2oC with about 229 days per
year below freezing. As a result of the high insolation in the
Zabuye Salt Lake area, there are about 248 days of sunshine
per year, the highest radiation is about 107 kJ m-2 yr-1.
Solar energy is the first economic alternative energy
resource for exploiting the salt lake due to its remote
location and the local climate. Mian-ping Zheng first
suggested in 1996 that solar ponds could be used to exploit
the lithium resource from Zabuye Salt Lake. Later, a solar
pond was constructed and tests were initiated, and a pond
with surface area of 40 m2 and a depth of 1.4 m was
constructed in 1999. This pond was used to study the
possibility of supplying the heat necessary for producing
lithium carbonate
(Zhao 2003; Zhao et al. 2004)
. In 2000,
the construction of a solar pond with a surface area of 1250
m2 and a depth of 2.5 m was started near Zabuye Salt Lake
as a collaborative effort between the Chinese Academy of
Geological Sciences (CAGS) and the Tibet Zabuye
HighTech Lithium Industry Company Ltd. (ZBY). In this phase
of the study it was shown that the solar pond could be
directly used for the production of lithium carbonate
(Luo
2003a, 2003b; Luo & Zheng 2004a, 2004b)
. A large solar
pond for producing lithium carbonate was built in October
2002 with a surface area of 3588 m2 and a depth of 4 m
resulting from collaboration between Tianjin University of
Science & Technology, ZBY and CAGS.
To operate the solar pond, the bottom 2-2.5 m was filled
with saturated lithium carbonate brine to form the lower
convective zone (LCZ). The upper part of the pond was
filled with fresh water for establishing the non-convective
zone (NCZ). After the NCZ layer is formed, the fresh water
was filled to a depth of about 25 cm. This newly formed
fresh water la (...truncated)