Sohd-hquid separations, references

Washing by successive dilution is used when the soHds are separated into a slurry, such as in filter thickeners. The soHds, thickened into a small amount of mother Hquor, are diluted into a wash Hquid and then separated again, diluted, separated, etc until clean of mother Hquor. The consumption of the wash Hquid can be reduced in countercurrent washing systems, sometimes referred to as countercurrent decantation. Cocurrent dilution washing, however, can be built into some dynamic filter-thickeners such as the Escher-Wyss filter. 

An example of a solid-liquid phase separation - often referred to as a mechanical separation - is filtration. Filters are also used in gas-sohd separation. Filtration may be used to recover liquid or sohd or both. Also, it can be used in waste-treatment processes. Walas [6] describes many solid-hquid separators, but we will only consider the rotary-drum filter. Reliable sizing of rotary-drum filters requires bench and pilot-scale testing with the slurry. Nevertheless, a model of the filtering process will show some of the physical factors that influence filtration and will give a preliminary estimate of the filter size in those cases where data are available. 

Fluidization refers to the condition in which soHd materials are given free-flowing, fluid-like behavior (29). As a gas is passed upward through a bed of sohd particles, the flow of gas produces forces which tend to separate the particles from one another. At low gas flows, the particles remain in contact with other soflds and tend to resist movement. This condition is referred to as a fixed bed. As the gas flow is increased, a point is reached at which the forces on the particles are just sufficient to cause separation. The bed then becomes fluidized. The gas cushion between the soflds allows the particles to move freely, giving the bed a Hquid-like characteristic. 

Ordinary diffusion involves molecular mixing caused by the random motion of molecules. It is much more pronounced in gases and Hquids than in soHds. The effects of diffusion in fluids are also greatly affected by convection or turbulence. These phenomena are involved in mass-transfer processes, and therefore in separation processes (see Mass transfer Separation systems synthesis). In chemical engineering, the term diffusional unit operations normally refers to the separation processes in which mass is transferred from one phase to another, often across a fluid interface, and in which diffusion is considered to be the rate-controlling mechanism. Thus, the standard unit operations such as distillation (qv), drying (qv), and the sorption processes, as well as the less conventional separation processes, are usually classified under this heading (see Absorption Adsorption Adsorption, gas separation Adsorption, liquid separation). 

Strictly speaking, the term racemic mixture applies only when the mixture of molecules is present as separate sohd phases, but in this book we shall use this expression to refer to any equimolar mixture of enantiomeric molecules, hquid, sohd, gaseous, or in solution. 

Phase inversion refers to the controlled transformation of a cast polymeric solution from a Hquid into a soHd state. During the phase-inversion process, a thermodynamically stable polymer solution is usually subjected to controlled Hquid-H-quid derabdng. This phase separation of the cast polymer solution into a polymer-rich and a polymer-lean phase can be induced by immersion in a non-solvent bath ( immersion precipitation ), by evaporating the volatile solvent from a polymer that was dissolved in a solvent/non-solvent mixture ( controlled evaporation ), by lowering the temperature ( thermal precipitation ) or by placing the cast film in a vapor phase that consists of a non-solvent saturated with a solvent ( precipitation from vapor phase ) [1]. 

---