Development of a procedure for defining the operation window of annular centrifugal contactors

Abstract

Although annular centrifugal contactors (ACCs) have been widely applied, their complex operation and its dependence on operational variables are still not fully quantified. That hinders their acceptance and precludes revealing their potential. Intuitive techniques to informedly operate ACCs while maximizing their gain are thus demanded. This work introduces a procedure to define the operation window of an extraction task on ACCs, using CINC V 02 variant, that demonstrates the feasible ranges of the operational variables and the maximum possible throughput. The overlapping impacts of the variables are also visualized, thus understood and, to enhance practicality, the procedure is converted into user-interface software. The concept is intended to adapt to any task on ACCs and it is based on merging a hydraulic part focusing on the rotor and a statistical one modeling the annulus mass transfer. Additional insights on ACC's hydraulics and mass transfer dynamics are presented, including the time needed to establish the steady state.