DOE OSTI2019
The crystalline silicotitanate, CST, resin manufactured by UOP Honeywell is well-suited for single-use decontamination of caustic liquid wastes at Hanford and Savannah River Sites. There are many measurements of column loading and breakthrough for CST resin decontamination of Cs-137 in various Hanford and SRS waste simulants. Such measurements provide a very good basis for estimating CST resin demand and these more refined predictions make the CST column loading as efficient as possible given the very expensive CST resin. Although there are a variety of tools for predicting chromatographic resin column performance, [1-4], there is a particularly useful method that is suitable as a simple spreadsheet model [4]. This spreadsheet model is an analytical error function for the mass transfer zone (mtz) diffusion width in resin columns and is well-suited for resin breakthrough and column loading. This paper describes just such an error function spreadsheet model and how well the error function agrees with more traditional models and fits the observed small scale breakthrough curves for CST that can then better predict large scale column loading efficiency. The very high sorption of Cs onto CST tends to be slower than that of other lower sorption resins and as a result of the slow CST kinetics, there is also a marked asymmetry in many CST breakthrough curves. The CST breakthrough asymmetry is largely due to the distribution of CST particle sizes because smaller particles sorb much faster than larger particles. It is then the smaller particles that determine the leading mtz at a decontamination factor of 1,000 breakthrough and therefore the decontamination efficiency for a given loading. The larger CST particles correspondingly determine the tailing mtz width and therefore the overall loading efficiency and it is important to model both leading and tailing mtz widths to best optimize CST for a particular Cs-137 decontamination application. (authors)
12 MANAGEMENT OF RADIOACTIVE AND NON-RADIOACTIVE W↗