Experimental investigations of the separation of aqueous entrainments from tri-n-butyl phosphate by electric fields

Abstract

The effectiveness of static and pulsed electric fields in separating entrainments with radioactive contamination from the PUREX process is investigated A laboratory-scale electric separator operating in the batch mode was developed for this purpose. The entrainment was labeled with Eu-152. The influences of electric field strength, poise frequency, mean residence time of the dispersion, and fraction of entrainment are presented. The residual entrainment in the dispersion can be reduced to below 5% of the initial value normally in less than 4 minutes, depending on the indicated parameters.