The salt lake brines that lithium
is extracted from have high chloride
levels making the brine very corrosive to stainless steel
extraction
column
internals. This is a significant problem in column
scale-up to industrial production. Two types of corrosion
-resistant ceramic internals, the hybrid ceramic internal and ceramic plate, were designed and tested under pilot conditions for future industrial application in this field. The hydrodynamic results (Yi et al. Ind Eng Chem Res 56(4):999–1007 (2016), [
1]) show that holdup of hybrid ceramic internal is higher than that of ceramic plate by around 50%, while Sauter mean diameter when using the hybrid ceramic internal is smaller than when using the ceramic plate by around 30%. This results in a larger mass transfer
area, hence better mass transfer
efficiency
for the hybrid ceramic internal. Axial dispersion
and mass transfer
parameters are also examined (Yi et al. Ind Eng Chem Res 56(11):2049–3058 (2017), [
2]). The results show that the column
with hybrid ceramic internals has 50% lower axial dispersion
coefficient and 50% higher mass transfer
coefficient, leading to higher mass transfer
efficiency
. The transfer unit height of the column
using hybrid ceramic internals can be as low as 0.2 m, showing very good efficiency
. This is promising for near-future applications. Two-phase computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
models have been developed for the two columns with ANSYS FLUENT commercial software. CFD
successfully predicts the higher holdup and lower axial dispersion
coefficients for the hybrid sieve plate pulsed column
as measured in the experiments, and the cause for the difference in performance has been explained with information from CFD
.