Specialty Products
St. Cloud Mining offers consulting services and technical collaboration to formulate and produce modified or blended zeolite products tailored to highly specialized applications and customer requirements.
We provide a number of customized products primarily for our existing distributors. These include specialty impregnated fertilizer products for golf course and hydroponic applications to improve the appearance and durability of the greens, and the yield and appearance of different fruit and vegetable crops.
St. Cloud also produces a toll processed ammonia-specific cation exchange resin that will effectively remove ammonia from effluent that is high in calcium. Under normal circumstances, calcium competes with ammonia for exchange sites on zeolite medias, reducing their efficacy.
Another important product is our SMZ (surface modified zeolites) materials. A quaternary amine is sorbed on to the zeolite substrate, profoundly altering the chemistry of the zeolite’s external surface. A bilayer-like structure is formed, causing the charge on the surface to change from negative to positive and the organic carbon content of the zeolite to increase to about 4-10% by weight, depending on loading. The positive surface charge provides sites for sorption of anions, such as chromate, selenite, and arsenate. The organic-rich surface layer provides a partitioning medium for sorption of non-polar organics, such as chlorinated solvents and fuel components. Some of the zeolite’s original cation exchange capacity is retained for cation exchanging positively charged species such as Pb2+ and Hg2+. Thus, SZM materials can simultaneously sorb the three major classes of water contaminants: inorganic cations, inorganic anions, and nonpolar organics. Customer specified organic loadings of 4-10% are available. Generally, our Winston Zeolite is used as the substrate, but Ash Meadows Zeolite and Bowie Chabazite can be treated as well.
Iron modified zeolite is an iron impregnated chabazite. Iron’s chemistry allows for the sorption and bonding of a number of anionic contaminants, including chromium, arsenic, and mercury. Test quantities of this product are available for testing.
Additionally, St. Cloud Mining holds two patents on modified zeolites used for mercury removal from flue gases at coal fired power plants. The products were tested in a pilot study at the Mercury Research Center, which used a portion of the James F. Crist Generating Plant’s (Plant Christ) emissions for the research. These technologies are available for licensing.