Centrifuges industrial

Peroxide, Abrasives Uranium enrichment (centrifuge). Industrial gases. Pulp and paper, Electrolytic H2 production... 

Ma.nufa.cture. The batch nitration processes for nitrocellulose have included the pot process, the centrifugal process, the Thompson displacement process, and the mechanical dipper process. Semicontinuous nitration processes are also widely used for military and industrial grades. 

The first differential centrifugal extractor to be used in industry was the PodbieHiiak extractor which was introduced in the 1950s (209,210) and can be regarded as a perforated-plate column wrapped around a rotor shaft. Rotation creates a centrifugal force which results in a great reduction in the equivalent height and contact time that would be needed in a conventional perforated-plate column. 

The behavior of drops in the centrifugal field has been studied (211) and the residence times and mass-transfer rates have been measured (212). PodbieHiiak extractors have been widely used in the pharmaceutical industry, eg, for the extraction of penicillin, and are increasingly used in other fields as weU. Commercial units having throughputs of up to 98 m /h (26,000 gal/h) have been reported. 

Aqueous media, such as emulsion, suspension, and dispersion polymerization, are by far the most widely used in the acryUc fiber industry. Water acts as a convenient heat-transfer and cooling medium and the polymer is easily recovered by filtration or centrifugation. Fiber producers that use aqueous solutions of thiocyanate or zinc chloride as the solvent for the polymer have an additional benefit. In such cases the reaction medium can be converted directiy to dope to save the costs of polymer recovery. Aqueous emulsions are less common. This type of process is used primarily for modacryUc compositions, such as Dynel. Even in such processes the emulsifier is used at very low levels, giving a polymerization medium with characteristics of both a suspension and a tme emulsion. 

Positive Pumps. Positive pumps employed by the food industry have a rotating cavity between two lobes, two gears that rotate in opposite directions, or a crescent or stationary cavity and a rotor. Rotary positive pumps operate at relatively low speed. Fluid enters the cavity by gravity flow or from a centrifugal pump. The positive pump also may use a reciprocating cavity, and may be a plunger or piston pump. These pumps are not truly positive with respect to displacement, but are used for metering product flow. 

Industrial separations are conducted in gravity or bath separators for a coarse feed, and in centrifugal separators for a fine feed (2,6,10). In gravity-type separators the feed and medium are introduced to the surface of a large quiescent pool of the medium. The float material overflows or is scraped from the pool surface. The heavy particles sink to the bottom of the separator and are removed using a pump or compressed air. The dmm separator (Fig. 13), up to 4.6 m dia and 7 m long, processes approximately 800 t/h, and treats feed of size up to 30 cm dia, operates in the gravity or the... 

Sedimentation Equipment. Centrifugal sedimentation equipment is usually characterized by limiting flow rates and theoretical settling capabihties. Feed rates in industrial appHcations may be dictated by Hquid handling capacities, separating capacities, or physical characteristics of the soHds. Sedimentation equipment performance is illustrated in Figure 8 on the basis of nominal clarified effluent flow rates and the appHcable values. The... 

The laboratory tubular centrifuge is similar to the industrial model. It operates with a motor or turbine drive at speeds to 50,000 rpm, generating 65,000 G at the latter speed in the 4.5 cm diameter bowl. The nominal capacity range is 30—2400 cm /min. This centrifuge is uniquely capable of separating far finer particles than any other production centrifugation equipment except the botde centrifuge. It is widely used in the production of flu vims. 

Thin-Film Evaporators. There are two types of thin-film evaporators commonly used in industrial appHcations. The first type introduces feed material into the center of a rotating heated conical receiver. Centrifugal force causes the feed to travel to the outer edge of the conical receiver where it is coUected and drawn off as residue. During the process, the heat causes the volatile components to be driven from the feed. These volatile components are condensed on a chilled surface of the evaporator and coUected as distUlate. 

The most widely available yeast biomass is a by-product of the brewing industry, where the multiplication of yeast during brewing results in a surplus of ceUs. Eor every barrel (117 L) of beer brewed, 0.2—0.3 kg of yeast soHds may be recovered. In the U.S., a substantial fraction is recovered and made available about 40 x 10 kg of brewers yeast aimually. The yeast is recovered from beer by centrifuging and dried on roUer dmms or spray dryers and sold as animal feed or a pet-food supplement. It can be debittered by alkaline extraction to remove the bitter hop residues, and is then sold mainly by the health-food industry. It is available as tablets, powder, or flakes and is often fortified with additional vitamins. Distillers yeast caimot be readily separated from the fermented mash and the mixture is sold as an animal feed supplement. 

Industrial, centrifugal elevators usually operate at speeds of about 75 m /min, and handle free-flowing, fine and loose materials having lump sizes of <50 mm. Sticky material can be a problem. Fine fluidizing materials often require perforations in the bottom of the buckets to vent entrapped air. Centrifugal elevator capacities range up to 370 m /h for a single row of buckets, and up to 1400 m /h for multiple rows of buckets. The buckets can be mounted on a belt or chain. 

Recovery. The principal purpose of recovery is to remove nonproteinaceous material from the enzyme preparation. Enzyme yields vary, sometimes exceeding 75%. Most industrial enzymes are secreted by a microorganism, and the first recovery step is often the removal of whole cells and other particulate matter (19) by centrifugation (20) or filtration (21). In the case of ceU-bound enzymes, the harvested cells can be used as is or dismpted by physical (eg, bead mills, high pressure homogenizer) and/or chemical (eg, solvent, detergent, lysozyme [9001 -63-2] or other lytic enzyme) techniques (22). Enzymes can be extracted from dismpted microbial cells, and ground animal (trypsin) or plant (papain) material by dilute salt solutions or aqueous two-phase systems (23). 

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