Equipment design throughput improvements

Mixer-settlers have been the more common type of equipment and, with the development of hydrometallurgy over the past 20 years, designs have improved considerably. To select the appropriate equipment, a clear understanding of the chemical and physical aspects of the process is required. Also the economics must be considered relative to the type of equipment to suit particular conditions of given throughput, solution and solvent type, kinetics and equilibrium, dispersion and coalescence, solvent losses, number of stages, available areas, and corrosion. 

Minimization goes much further than storage, however. For many processes the largest inventory of hazardous materials is in the reactor. If, through radical reactor design, inventories and equipment size can be reduced whilst throughput is maintained, then this presents opportunities for improved safety and possibly reduced capital costs. This is the concept behind Process Intensification which is discussed more fully below. 

The yield of niobium is about 90 per cent from the double fluoride, although the loss is dependent principally upon the care exercised in the handling operations. Clearly, this could be improved if the throughput of the plant was sufficiently high to justify more careful attention to the design of equipment for handling operations. 

This chapter will discuss the equipment necessary to set up a catalyst development laboratory and the analytical instrumentation required to characterize the polyethylene produced with experimental catalysts. The introduction of high throughput research methods since the 1990s has improved the potential productivity of such a laboratory. In addition, utilization of designed experiments in which the effect of several variables on the properties under investigation can be screened in a more efficient manner is also necessary to discover new technology for commercialization. 

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