The design and performance of pump-mix and gravity-flow mixer-settlers.

Abstract

The historical development of pump-mix and gravity-flow mixer-settlers is reviewed and their operating and design features, including scale-up, are discussed. An experimental study of the hydraulic operating characteristics of two such units, an AAEC designed pump-mix mixer-settler based on the original KAPL work and a UKAEA Windscale gravity-flow mixer-settler is described. The pump-mix unit was shown to be less flexible in operation than the gravity-flow unit and it is shown that an increase in size of all the ports will increase the throughput of the pump-mix mixer-settler.