ABSTRACT
It is important to recover surfactant from a number of surfactant-based separation processes for reuse in order for the process to be economical. In this chapter, a new method of recovering ionic surfactant by crystallization or precipitation from a concentrated solution is discussed. The surfactant can be precipitated using monovalent or multivalent counterions. In this work, divalent calcium and trivalent aluminum cations were used to precipitate anionic dodecyl sulfate. Ultimate recoveries of 95% were shown to be attainable using this process.
