Zabuye Salt Lake solar pond in Tibet, China: Construction and operational experience

Natural Resources and Environmental Issues, Dec 2009

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, and different 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.

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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 - 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)


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Weinong Huang, Xuekui Wang, Zhinan Sun, Zhen Nie, Zuoliang Sha. Zabuye Salt Lake solar pond in Tibet, China: Construction and operational experience, Natural Resources and Environmental Issues, 2009, Volume 15, Issue 1,