Transient Heat Transfer Analysis For Ion-Exchange Waste Removal Process

The small column ion exchange (SCIX) process treats low curie salt (LCS) waste before feeding it to the saltstone facility to be made into grout. Through this process, radioactive cesium from the salt solution is absorbed into the CST bed. A CST column loaded with radioactive cesium will generate significant heat from radiolytic decay. If engineering designs of the CST sorption column can not handle this thermal load, hot spots may develop locally within the column and degrade the performance of the ion-exchange process. The CST starts to degrade at about 80 to 85 C, and the CST completely changes to another material above 120 C. In addition, the process solution will boil around 130 C. If the column boiled dry, the sorbent could plug the column and require replacement of the column module. The objective of the present work is to compute temperature distributions across the column as a function of transit time after the initiation of accidents when there is loss of the salt solution flow in the CST column under abnormal conditions of the process operations. In this situation, the customer requested that the calculations should be conservative in that the model results would show the maximum centerline temperatures achievable by the CST design configurations. The thermal analysis results will be used to evaluate the fluid temperature distributions and the process component temperatures within the ion exchange system. This information will also assist in the system design and maintenance.