A prospective 99mTc organic radiotracer for applications in the Oil Industry

Radiotracers are very important in the oil industry. The extraction with trioctylamine (TOA) and tributylphosphate (TBF) has been used to obtain a radiotracer in organic phase from the eluent of the 99Mo/99mTc generator. In this work we studied the influence of the phase separation method in the extraction of technetium 99 metastable pertechnetate ( ). Centrifugation was necessary to obtain adequate separation. The formulation TBF-TOA-cyclohexane was optimized for the extraction of 600 MBq activity of , perspective for industrial scale applications. Additionally, with 7.53%TBF-0.77%TOA-cyclohexane formulation, the highest extraction yield (96.86%) was achieved. A laboratory installation that simulates a continuous horizontal gravitational separator (oil-water layer), was constructed and evaluated.