Surrogate waste streams

The primary purpose of the test facility is to have equipment capable of creating surrogate waste streams similar to those commonly encountered in industry and destroy them under controlled conditions with adequate instrumentation to quantify parameters that affect the process. Destruction of waste streams is achieved by proper mixing, sufficient temperature, and adequate residence time in the TO. These parameters are often referred to as the three T s of combustion time, temperature, and turbulence. In addition to waste destruction, the effects of the three T s on other parameters such as CO and NO emissions can also be carefully studied in a test facility. A schematic of a horizontal thermal oxidizer is shown in Figure 33.1. 

Table 33.3 illustrates how an exothermic waste gas stream may be simulated with a simpler surrogate waste stream. 

While industrial practice requires a trial burn and a facility may not operate until the data are accepted, industrial facilities obtain approval to process many different waste streams based on a single trial burn. In special situations, particularly with toxic materials such as polychlorinated biphenyls, both a surrogate burn and a trial burn would be required. RCRA regulations offer the option of allowing the use of data from another facility, under certain conditions, in lieu of a trial burn. However, industry has used this mechanism at only a few sites with similar units. It has been used twice by the CMA for the Tooele, Utah, disposal facility. The CMA should pursue this mechanism with the respective regulatory authorities. The committee believes that chemical agent disposal facilities are treated similarly to industrial facilities with respect to the conduct of trial bums. 

Table 16.5 lists the surrogate (simulated) waste streams that were part of this study. The ash stream represents radioactive waste from the inventory of US Department of Energy (DOE) facilities. The Delphi DETOX streams are secondary waste generated during destruction of organics from similar waste streams [57]. The soil represents the waste from Argonne National Laboratory s inventory that was included in a site treatment plan for actual treatment. 

---