Jilin Petrochemical Company is the biggest Acrylonitrile production base in China. Its current production capacity is 212,000 tons/year. New equipment with the production capacity of 106,000 tons/year was built and put into production in 2007. However, during the production process of Acrylonitrile, a great deal of waste water will be generated. Part of the high concentration organic waste water contains hypertoxic cyanide compounds. If it flows into the biological treatment equipment for waste water, a large sum of bacteria will die. At present, factories mainly adopt the burning method to deal with the cyanide-bearing waste water. Every year, 20,000 – 30,000 tons of fuel oil is consumed to burn 200,000 tons of waste water. The cost amounts to millions of Renminbi.
For several years, Jilin Petrochemical Corporation has been looking for an alternative treatment method in order to lower the cost of waste water treatment. The effect of an irradiation technology provided by an America company was remarkable in dealing with this waste water. However, because of the restraints in technology export of US, it can not be imported to China. Consequently, Jilin Petrochemical Company decided to develop irradiation technology independently to dispose waste water.

The first step was to conduct feasibility demonstration. However, Jilin Petrochemical Company could not find a way out to carry out this demonstration., because 1)there was industrial irradiation equipments in the market, but the price was high; 2) a large quantity of supporting facilities had to be invested; 3)there was a lack of qualified personnel; 4)the ultimate object of buying irradiation equipemnt and supporting facilities was to use them in production. However, this expensive equipments bought during the experiment stage would be discarded after the factory put into production,which is uneconomic.

In this case, Coway provided Jilin Petrochemical Company with a satisfactory solution. The solution was to conduct prophase demonstration by using the irradiation experiment equipment of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University. This equipment employed (60) Co as the irradiation source, which was appropriate for doing irradiation experiment to small samples. The experts of the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology were rich in experience and good at the operation of the equipment. Furthermore, they were able to provide appropriate experiment plan according to the features of water sample. Jilin Petrochemical Company only paid the research experiment fee,without investing too much on capital and human resources on the feasibility demonstration.

The result of the irradiation experiment showed that using irradiation method could get rid of the hypertoxic cyanide compounds effectively in waste water. But this method could not remove the inorganic pollutants in the waste water. Only by integrating the other measures could the problem of pollution be solved. Moreover, completely using irradiation would result in higher energy consumption and lower economic efficiency. Therefore, an integrated technology solution had to be developed so as to remove all of the pollutants, cut down irradiation time and improve economic efficiency.Based on the recognition of the prophase experiment service, Jilin Petrochemical Company entrusted Coway and the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University to provide the development and research service of the irradiation-biological integration treatment technology for Acrylonitrile waste water..

Through laboratory test, Coway and the Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology developed a treatment solution integrating irradiation, membrane technology and biological method. this solution was able to lower the waste water treatment cost greatly. It also offered a good solution to the problem of Acrylonitrile waste water treatment that has troubled Jilin Petrochemical Company for a long time. At present, this project has already been set up in PetroChina and the further model experiments are underway.