New filterability and compressibility test cell design for nuclear products

Filterability and compressibility tests are often carried out at laboratory scale to obtain data required to scale up solid/liquid separation processes. Current technologies, applied with a constant pressure drop, enable specific resistance and cake formation rate measurement in accordance with a modified Darcyʹs law. The new test cell design described in this paper is easily usable without tools in a glove box and minimizes the slurry volume necessary for this type of study. This is an advantage for investigating toxic and hazardous products such as radioactive materials. Uranium oxalate precipitate slurries were used to test and validate this new cell. In order to reduce the test cell volume, a statistical approach was applied on 8 results obtained with cylindrical test cells of 1.8 cm and 3 cm in diameter. Wall effects can therefore be ignored despite the small filtration cell diameter, allowing tests to be performed with only about one-tenth of the slurry volume of a standard commercial cell. The significant reduction in the size of this experimental device does not alter the consistency of filtration data which may be used in the design of industrial equipment.