부산대학교 도서관

The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) has built and operated a pilot plant for processing oil shale using recirculating hot solids. This pilot plant, was adapted in 1993 to demonstrate the feasibility of decomposing base hydrolysate, a mixture of sodium nitrite, sodium formate and other constituents. This material is the waste stream from the base hydrolysis process for destruction of energetic materials, being studied by researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). In the Livermore process, the waste feed is thermally treated in a moving packed bed of ceramic spheres, where constituents in the waste decompose, in the presence of carbon dioxide, to form solid sodium carbonate and a suite of gases including: methane, carbon monoxide, oxygen, nitrogen oxides, ammonia and possibly molecular nitrogen. The authors performed an extended one day (8 hour) test of the solids recirculation system, with continuous injection of approximately 0.035 gal/min of waste for period of seven hours. Continuous on-line gas analysis was invaluable in tracking the progress of the experiment and quantifying the decomposition products. Analyses showed the primary solid product, collected in the lift exit cyclone, was indeed sodium carbonate, as expected. For the reactor condition studied in this test, N{sub 2}O was found to be the primary nitrogen bearing gas species. However, other experimental results indicate that in a more oxidizing environment, with longer residence times, the production of N{sub 2}O can be limited. In the test, approximately equal quantities of ammonia and nitrogen bearing oxide gases were produced (NO, NO{sub 2} and N{sub 2}O).