Resin attrition

The total resin inventory is 825 ft the resin circulation rate is 1320 ft /day or 26 liters/min. Despite the continuous flow of resin, attrition rate has been very low, averaging only 0.076 percent per day. Absence of abrasive sand particles coarser than 325 mesh is important in keeping the attrition rate low. 

Most gums and resins, natural or artificial, when used in the paint, varnish, or plastic industries, are not ground veiy fine, and hammer or cage mills will produce a suitable product. Typical performance of the di attrition mill is given in Table 20-25. Roll crusners will often give a sufficiently fine product. 

Variances in resin performance and capacities can be expected from normal annual attrition rates of ion-exchange resins. Typical attrition losses that can be expected include (1) Strong cation resin 3 percent per year for three years or 1,000,000 gals/ cu.ft (2) Strong anion resin 25 percent per year for two years or 1,000,000 gals/ cu.ft (3) Weak cation/anion 10 percent per year for two years or 750,000 gals/ cu. ft. A steady falloff of resin-exchange capacity is a matter of concern to the operator and is due to several conditions ... 

Attrition The rubbing of one particle against another in a resin bed frictional wear that will affect the site of resin particles. 

Physical stability The quality which an ion-exchange resin must possess to resist changes that might be caused by attrition, high temperatures, and other physical conditions. 

Most types of ion-exchange resin suffer some breakdown and volume loss over time because of attrition, excessive heat, or other factors. Water softeners should be inspected annually, and a double backwash procedure should be provided. This generally lifts the broken resin ( fines ) to the top of the bed, where it can be removed and replaced to restore capacity. Allow for 5 to 10% resin operating capacity loss per year because of physical breakdown. At many sites the resin is unfortunately not inspected regularly but merely replaced when a serious decline in operating capacity is noticed. Here a resin life expectancy of, say, 6 to 8 years probably is the norm. 

Hard, attrition-resistant, insoluble synthetic polymers (typically a copolymer of styrene with divinylbenzene). The resins are manufactured in a spherical bead shape that contain either exchangeable anion or cation portions, capable of exchanging with other anions or cations and usually in an aqueous medium. Typically cation resins for water softening will have a practical operating capacity of 20,000 gpg (at 6 lb NaCl per cu ft) rising to 30,000 gpg (at 15 lb NaCl per cu ft). 

Mechanical attrition is used to remove most of the spent binder. First, dry attrition or abrasion processes crush lumps to grain size. Mechanical abrasion is then used to separate the binder from the sand grains. Sometimes, sand is pneumatically propelled against a metal target plate. The impact of the sand on the plate scrubs off the clay and resin coating from the sand grains. Fines are separated and removed by dry classification. 

Chelating resins undergo volumetric change by as much as 50% in converting from the hydrogen form to sodium form. This tends to cause attrition of the resin and reduce its life. 

Since cross-linked polymers caruiot be re-formed or re-shaped it is necessary to synthesize them in the final physical form appropriate for each particular application. Particles in the size range 50-1000 pm are suitable for laboratory scale chemistry, while larger particles have advantages in large scale continuous processes. Irregularly shaped particles are susceptible to mechanical attrition and breakdown to fines , whereas the process of suspension polymerization [13] yields uniform spherical cross-linked polymer particles often referred to as beads, pearls or resins. These are much more mechanically robust and are widely exploited on both a small and large scale e. g. as the basis of ion exchange resins [14]. 

Among the naturally occurring filler materials are cellulosics such as wood flour, a-cellulose, shell flour, and starch, and proteinaceous fillers such as soybean residues. Approximately 40,000 t of cellulosic fillers are used annually by the U.S. polymer industry. Wood flour, which is produced by the attrition grinding of wood wastes, is used as filler for phenolic resins, urea resins, polyolefins, and PVC. Shell flour, which lacks the fibrous structure of wood flour, has been used as a replacement for wood flour for some applications. 

In the reclamation of chemically or resin bonded sands, the system employed must be able to break the bond between the resin and sand and remove the fines that are generated. The systems most commonly employed are wet washing and scrubbing for silicate bonded sands, or dry scrubbing/attrition and thermal (rotary drum or fluidized bed) systems for resin bonded sands. 

Table I lists some properties of SMC and BMC. These are a function of resin composition, reinforcement, and molding conditions atid may be regarded as typical. This will serve as a frame of reference as to the property levels obtained with SMC and BMC. The differences which exist between SMC and BMC in tensile, flexural, and impact strengths are attributable to more than just the difference in glass loading. Fiber attrition arising from the compounding techniques for BMC as well as the shorter input fiber length account for the lower strengths.

The resin beads used in most columnar operations range in size from 0.3 to 0.9 mm in diameter, which is a compromise based on the effect of ion-exchange rates, capacities, and hydraulic characteristics. The especially made resins used in resin-in-pulp operations range in size from 0.8 to 1.6 mm in diameter. The apparent density of a resin is defined as that weight of backwashed and settled wet resin per cubic foot, which for resins used in the uranium industry is about 38-45 Ib/ft . In column operations, the attrition losses due to swelling and contraction of resin, abrasion of resin-resin surfaces, and abrasion of resin-equipment surfaces are negligible. In resin-in-pulp operations, an appreciable amount of attrition loss is encountered. 

Carman (C6) described the successful development and application to a uranium resin-in-pulp process of a continuous countercurrent ion-exchange pilot plant. This new technique is based on the observation that the resins at the correct level of air agitation float in close proximity to the surface of the pulp. So long as the resin beads are able to move about gently but freely in the surface layer, a satisfactory rate of ion exchange is possible. Under this condition, the mechanical damage to the resin due to attrition is negligible. 

In the early days of development of continuous ion exchange processes the benefits to water treatment of high efficiency and low leakage were paralleled by the rapidly advancing designs of counterflow fixed bed plant. Thus the more complex hydrodynamic requirements of CIX, resin losses due to mechanical attrition, and perhaps a conservative attitude towards availability of plant during periods of unscheduled maintenance meant that, in the UK at least, the CIX... 

The uranium loading of 3600 ppm amounts to less than 3 % of the total uranium capacity. A high attrition resistance of the resin beads, expected in contrast to hydrous titanium oxide, could be demonstrated in long-term experiments. Granules exposed to natural sea water in a fluidized bed for more than 6 months showed almost no attack of the outer surface however, the initial white color of the beads changed to brown, probably due to the complexation of transition metals. Uranium is mainly accumulated in a narrow surface layer of the beads. The high uranium selectivity of the resin can be deduced from Table 7. 

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