No abstract

Sorption is often carried out in stirred batch reactors without any consideration of how much mixing is sufficient to avoid the effect of diffusion without compromising yield and cost due to overmixing. Therefore, the focus of this work was to study how the maximum sorption capacity, removal efficiency, kinetics and power consumption (P) of the studied process are affected by different mixing speeds, i.e., impeller speed/minimum impeller speed for complete suspension (N/NJS) ratio values and zeolite suspension mass concentrations. Experiments were conducted in a baffled reactor with the propeller at a standard off-bottom clearance. In addition to the experimental studies, numerical modelling approaches were carried out to investigate the sorption process using a transient multiphase computational fluid dynamics model and fitting selected kinetic models. The results show that an increase in zeolite mass leads to a slight increase in the NJS and consequently PJS. The impeller speed affects the velocities, power consumption, kinetics, final amount and removal efficiency of copper sorbed. The experimentally determined kinetic data fit Ritchie’s kinetic model well. However, for two experiments, performed at N/NJS ratios of 0.8 and 0.6, Mixed kinetic model fits better, suggesting that the second-order reaction is suppressed by diffusion. Due to the influence of diffusion, the experimentally determined sorption efficiency decreased from 59.377% to 54.486% and 46.372% for N/NJS ratios of 0.8 and 0.6, respectively.

No abstract

Effect of hydrodynamics on ion exchange in a batch reactor is still not appropriately studied even though proper mixing parameters may considerably affect the process of solid suspension and its costs. In this work, hydrodynamic conditions generated by straight blade turbine (SBT) impellers on suspension in the batch reactor with and without baffles were investigated. The aim of this work was to analyze influence of impeller diameter and zeolite mass on just suspended impeller speed, (NJS) power consumption, maximum amount of copper exchanged onto zeolite NaX and copper exchange kinetics as well. All experiments were conducted at the same temperature, initial concentration of the copper solution and zeolite particle size. The obtained results showed that just suspended impeller speed decreases as impeller diameter increases in the reactor with and without baffles but this trend is considerably more pronounced in the reactor with baffles. The increase in zeolite mass causes a slight increase of NJS in the both reactor. In the reactor with the baffles this increment became noticeably higher as impeller diameter decrease. Power consumption, at the state of complete zeolite suspension, decreases as impeller diameter increases and its values in the reactor without baffles are considerably lower as well. Kinetics results indicated that the amount of copper ion increases significantly in the initial stage and then gradually until the equilibrium is reached for all hydrodynamics conditions and mass of zeolite examined.

The removal of copper and cobalt ions from binary metal solutions on zeolite NaX by ion exchange process was investigated. Experiments were conducted in unbaffled glass reactor with a Rushton turbine as a stirrer. The dependence of ion exchange kinetics and the amount exchanged were tested using different initial concentrations of metal ions in mixtures. The results obtained indicate that the removal efficiency depends on the initial heavy metal concentrations in binary solutions. Experimental kinetics data were analysed using Ritchie and Weber-Morris models. According to AARD values, the rate in this study was reaction-controlled.