Phosphate Product Recovery in Human Urine using Metal Chlorides

Phosphate is a necessary and soon to be scarce nutrient needed for all life that is found in urine. Metal chlorides can be used to extract phosphate that can be converted into useful products, namely struvite a fertilizer. Different metal chlorides’ phosphate removal ability in urine were measured by testing a molar equivalent amount of metal chloride tested at 5 minutes and 24 hours in duplicate. Phosphate removal was calculated using spectrophotometry and compared across the metal chlorides in a simulation in Visual MINTEQ, simple synthetic, full synthetic, and real urine for fresh and hydrolyzed urine. It was found that simple and full fresh synthetic urine had comparable results, but synthetic urine and real urine did not. It was also found that simple and full hydrolyzed synthetic urine are not very comparable. Overall, there was more precipitation in the real urine than the full synthetic urine and hydrolyzed urine. Time did not have a large effect on the removal trends between the same type of urine. CeCl3 performed the best for both fresh and hydrolyzed urine, and struvite produced more in hydrolyzed real urine rather than fresh.