Simultaneous sulfate and chloride removal from MHD spent seed using anion-exchange resin

At the University of Tennessee Space Institute, (UTSI) a process to simultaneously remove sulfates and chlorides from spent seed material from a coal-fired magnetohydrodynamics (MHD) power plant has been developed. This process uses commercially available weak-base anion-exchange resin and can be used to regenerate the spent seed. In this thesis, results from batch and fixed-bed experiments conducted at UTSI to simultaneously remove sulfates and chlorides from MHD spent seed are discussed. Three commercially available anion-exchange resins were tested in batch mode experiments to study the sulfate and chloride removal efficiency. Process variables that affect the percentage removal like, the solution-to-resin ratio, solution concentration and multi-stage operation were studied. For the fixed- bed tests, experiments were conducted using two different resin carbonation procedures. One procedure involved carbonating the ion-exchange resin simultaneously during exhaustion and in the other procedure precarbonated resin was used. Results from the fixed-bed experiments performed by the latter procedure were explained by the Antonson's model that assumes intraparticle diffusion to be the overall rate controlling step. A kinetic model assuming reaction rate as the rate controlling step was used to analyze the simultaneous carbonation/exhaustion runs.