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Assoc. Prof. Dr Hal Aral (Waste Treatment at CSIRO)

Hal Aral with a PhD in Geochemistry from the Netherlands in 1986, joined CSIRO Minerals in 1990 and has since then led numerous projects over a diverse range of disciplines including the extraction of salts from Australia’s inland saline waters, treatment of waste waters of the gold processing and food industry, and removal of arsenic and heavy metals from various industrial and urban waters.

In 1999 he initiated a research team for CSIRO Minerals to work on the applied and fundamental aspects of salt, salinity and water recovery from waste waters. Early on in this research he developed a unique desktop evaluation technique that involved the (a) application of a thermodynamic modelling program to obtain information about the quality and quantity of salts to be produced from a given water and (b) mathematical modelling using the thermodynamic modelling output to design a salt field operating at its optimum productivity, and (c) a method to validate the modelling results under the scanning electron microscope. The latter allowed real time observation of the crystallization of salts and their chemical analysis.

Dr Aral’s greatest achievement was the development and recent commercialization of a process that recovered Epsom salt from the waste waters of a salt producer in Victoria. Dr Aral is renown for his Zero Waste approach to salinity, both in Australia and overseas. Dr Aral strongly believes that Australia’s underground saline and industrial waste waters are a resource not be wasted. 

 

Last Updated: September 11, 2008