(265b) Solvent Characterization for Uranium Extraction Using Dimensionless Dispersion Number and Its Applicability for Scale up of Stage Wise Liquid-Liquid Extractors

Dimensionless dispersion number is used to characterize the liquid-liquid dispersions created in turbulent Couette flow for design of stage-wise liquid-liquid extractors like mixer settler and centrifugal extractors. Currently, India is suffering from severe nuclear fuel shortage to run the existing reactors at full capacity. It has proceeded to explore all the possibility to recover uranium for the purpose of power generation. In an effort to it, Department of Atomic Energy is setting up a demonstration plant for extraction of uranium from wet phosphoric acid. To facilitate solvent characterization for uranium extraction and estimate the process throughput, dispersion number (N-Di) test was performed for both types of dispersion (aqueous dispersion and organic dispersion) with various A/O ratios. Three grades of phosphoric acid and two solvents were selected and all the physical properties of solvent pairs were estimated. A suitable correlation was developed between the dispersion number and physical properties of the solvent pairs. The dispersion number was used to estimate the throughput for centrifugal extractor of 125 mm bowl. The same procedure can be implemented to size the settler of the gravity based mixer-settler.