A novel
rotating microchannel (RM) is made in our lab, which is
used for the demulsification study in this paper. 2-ethylhexyl phosphoric
acid-2-ethylhexyl ester (P507)–water emulsion without a surfactant and the kerosene–water
emulsion with an emulsifier (sodium dodecyl sulfate) were considered.
The influence of the emulsion type, inner cylinder speed, declination
angle, volumetric flow rate of the emulsion, and cycle time on demulsification
was investigated. The results showed that the emulsion and organic
phase present good demulsification performance in parallel flow in
the RM. The principle of destabilization is that the centrifugal force
increases the random collision probability of droplets on the microchannel
wall. By repeatedly passing through the RM three times, the total
demulsification (organic phase recovery) efficiency of both the P507–water
emulsion and kerosene–water emulsion exceeds 96%. A higher
total demulsification efficiency is obtained by the RM at a low rotation
speed (100 < R < 700 rpm), which is at least
an order of magnitude less than that by conventional high-speed centrifugation
(R: 4000 rpm).
The flow patterns of gas-liquid-liquid three-phase fluids in the rotating microchannel extractor (RME) were studied in this paper. The kerosene-water system without mass transfer and the 2%P507-22%NaH 2 PO 4 system with mass transfer were considered. The influence of interfacial tension, microchannel structure, and rotation rate on three-phase flow patterns were investigated. Eight different flow patterns such as droplet-continuous flow, long dropletcontinuous flow, filiform parallel-continuous flow, filiform parallel-filiform parallel flow, small droplet-continuous flow, filiform parallel-small droplet flow, small droplet-small droplet flow, and continuous-filiform parallel flow were observed. The results showed that the proposed universal flow pattern map can effectively predict the flow patterns of the two systems and the small droplet-small droplet flow has the best effect of extracting Fe 3+ from the 2%P507-22%NaH 2 PO 4 system. The traditional first-order equilibrium extraction efficiency was 102% while the percentage extraction was up to 85% (14.4 mg/L) after one stage extraction and about 97.9% (2.0 mg/L) after twostage extraction. K E Y W O R D S ferric(III) ion, gas-liquid-liquid flow, mass transfer, rotating microchannel extractor
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