adammal44
Nuclear
- Feb 7, 2009
- 52
We use zeolitic media for the removal of cesiums in our process plant.
Because of hazards in handling the media after exhaustion, we sluice the spent zeolites to a large storage tank (~7 m³) for some of the radioactivity decay and for an appropriate waste container to be available. We flush forward to sluice the zeolite from the demineralizer to the storage tank.
For reasons, we pump the zeolite from the storage tank to a waste container. The arrangement is that we introduce demineralized water through 4 eductors in the tank to try and stir/fluidize the tank contents. The eductors should be well sized enough to allow zeolite flow through them along with the water. We've been seeing plugging in our eductors and suspect that the zeolite is clumping up and blocking the eductors.
Has anyone else had experience with this clumping? Limited to bad QA controls on the zeolite or endemic to all commercial grade material?
(Note that this is cross-posted with Piping/Fluid Mechanics forum, as I expect that the audience is diverse enough between the forums to justify the benefits of cross-posting versus drawbacks of split discussion)
Because of hazards in handling the media after exhaustion, we sluice the spent zeolites to a large storage tank (~7 m³) for some of the radioactivity decay and for an appropriate waste container to be available. We flush forward to sluice the zeolite from the demineralizer to the storage tank.
For reasons, we pump the zeolite from the storage tank to a waste container. The arrangement is that we introduce demineralized water through 4 eductors in the tank to try and stir/fluidize the tank contents. The eductors should be well sized enough to allow zeolite flow through them along with the water. We've been seeing plugging in our eductors and suspect that the zeolite is clumping up and blocking the eductors.
Has anyone else had experience with this clumping? Limited to bad QA controls on the zeolite or endemic to all commercial grade material?
(Note that this is cross-posted with Piping/Fluid Mechanics forum, as I expect that the audience is diverse enough between the forums to justify the benefits of cross-posting versus drawbacks of split discussion)
