Design of distillation solvent recovery system

With the advent or the atomic bomb during the summer of 1945 the opportunity for engineering colleges to provide an integrated course of study in the field of nuclear engineering was presented. This opportunity has been greatly enhanced by a policy of the Atomic Energy commission, granting funds to selected institutions for equipment necessary for successful instruction in this field. The Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy, realizing the opportunity presented, has established a course of study in nuclear engineering in which the departments of Ceramic, Chemical, Mechanical and Metallurgical Engineering and Physics are taking an active part. That portion of this program which is based upon the science of chemistry and the unit operations of chemical engineering is the responsibility of the Department of Chemical Engineering. A part or this responsibility is to offer to the student a sound theoretical and practical understanding of the chemical processing of nuclear fuels. A valuable tool in such a presentation is a pilot plant-sized prototype of a portion of a typical fuels processing plant. In order to function as an effective instructional aid, the prototype unit must: (1) be nonhazardous, thus precluding the use of radioactive nuclear fuels materials, (2) clearly show the internal functioning of the equipment, (3) be reasonably simple, so that students can operate it with understanding, (4) have flexibility for study of the effects of variables and (5) have adequate instrumentation so that conditions within· the equipment may be readily determined. To meet the needs for such instruction, the decision was made to design and construct a prototype system such as described above. In this system acetone will be extracted from an acetone-carbon tetrachloride mixture by water, with the resulting acetone-water solution separated by distillation. The purpose of this investigation was to design the necessary equipment to separate, by distillation, the products of an instructional prototype of a chemical nuclear fuels refining system. The design was coordinated with the design of the extraction equipment which constituted the remainder of the process --Introduction, pages 1-2