Drop formation characteristics in high speed agitation of centrifugal extractor

For the solvent extraction of reprocessing plant, mixer-settler, pulsed column are operated and centrifugal extractor is expected to be used. Mixer-settler has the defect of long contact time. It comes out to cause the solvent damage by radiation in FBR fuel reprocessing. In order to escape from the damage, pulse column and centrifugal extractor should be used for FBR spent fuel. However, the characteristics in centrifugal extractor have not yet been fully analyzed, while those of mixer-settler are advanced much. Therefore, the agitation experiment was made to find out the difference of drop formation between mixer-settler and centrifugal extractor. From the results, the average drop diameter is proportional to Weber number to the power of -0.58, when the contact time is long. However, the agitation velocity did not affect the average drop size, when the contact time is less than 11.3 s. (author)