Precipitation and Deposition of Aluminum-Containing Phases in Tank Wastes

摘要

In the first phase of our study, we focused on the use of simple organics to raise the solubility of aluminum oxyhydroxides in high alkaline aqueous solvents. In a limited survey of common organic acids, we determined that citric acid had the highest potential to achieve our goal. However, our subsequent investigation revealed that the citric acid appeared to play two roles in the solutions: first, raising the concentration of aluminum in highly alkaline solutions by breaking up or inhibiting ''seed'' polycations and thereby delaying the nucleation and growth of particles; and second, stabilizing nanometer-sized particles in suspension when nucleation did occur. The results of this work were recently published in Langmuir: D.M. Dabbs, U. Ramachandran, S. Lu, J. Liu, L.-Q. Wang, I.A. Aksay, ''Inhibition of Aluminum Oxyhydroxide Precipitation with Citric Acid'' Langmuir, 21, 11690-11695 (2005). The second phase of our work involved the solvation of silicon, again in solutions of high alkalinity. Citric acid, due to its unfavorable pKa values, was not expected to be useful with silicon-containing solutions. Here, the use of polyols was determined to be effective in maintaining silicon-containing particles under high pH conditions but at smaller size with respect to standard suspensions of silicon-containing particles. There were a number of difficulties working with highly alkaline silicon-containing solutions, particularly in solutions at or near the saturation limit. Small deviations in pH resulted in particle formation or dissolution in the absence of the organic agents. One of the more significant observations was that the polyols appeared to stabilize small particles of silicon oxyhydroxides across a wider range of pH, albeit this was difficult to quantify due to the instability of the solutions.