"The Hanford double-shell tank (DST) system provides the staging location for waste feed delivery to the Hanford Tank Waste Treatment and Immobilization Plant (WTP). Hall (2008) includes WTP acceptance criteria that describe physical and chemical characteristics of the waste that must be certified as acceptable before the waste is transferred from the DSTs to the WTP. One of the more challenging requirements relates to the sampling and characterization of the undissolved solids (UDS) in a waste feed DST. The objectives of Washington River Protection Solutions' (WRPS) Small Scale Mixing Demonstration (SSMD) project are to understand and demonstrate the DST sampling and batch transfer performance at multiple scales using slurry simulants comprised of UDS particles and liquid (Townson 2009). The SSMD project utilizes geometrically scaled DST feed tanks to generate mixing, sampling, and transfer test data. In Phase 2 of the testing, RPP-49740, the 5-part simulant defined in RPP-48358 was used as the waste slurry simulant. The Phase 2 test data are being used to estimate the expected performance of the prototypic systems in the full-scale DSTs. As such, understanding of the how the samll-scale systems as well as the simulant relate to the full-scale DSTs and actual waste is required. The focus of this report is comparison of the size and density of the 5-part SSMD simulant to that of the Hanford waste. This is accomplished by computing metrics for particle mobilization, suspension, settling, transfer line intake, and pipeline transfer from the characterization of the 5-part SSMD simulant and characterizations of the Hanford waste. In addition, the effects of the suspending fluid characteristics on the test results are considered, and a computational fluid dynamics tool useful to quantify uncertainties from simulant selections is discussed."
Revised: January 13, 2012 |
Published: August 15, 2011