Chemical Engineering Laboratory II - Filtration | CHE 382, Lab Reports of Chemistry

Download Chemical Engineering Laboratory II - Filtration | CHE 382 and more Lab Reports Chemistry in PDF only on Docsity! ChE 382: Unit Operations Laboratory FILTRATION rev: Fall 2005 Introduction Filtration is one of the oldest unit operations in engineering. Its use in solid liquid sepa- ration began in minerals processing and has consistently been an important separation in the chemical industry. Today, it is often used as an essential technique in the purification of advanced biomaterials. Filters can be operated in a batch mode or as a continuous depending mainly on the quantity of material to be treated. The system consists of a separation device to allow fluid to flow through the medium while retaining the solids. The driving force for the separation is an applied pressure. To have an economical system, it is necessary to devise techniques to keep a deep cake of solid from building up on the separating surface. This can be done by adding components to the feed, which facilitates the breakup of the filter cake and to employ various mechanical and chemical cleaning procedures. This Unit Operations experiment focuses on a typical filtration process and allows gen- eration of the type of experimental data which could be used in a process scale-up and in the development of process economics for filtration. Experiment The basic filtration unit consists of a feed storage tank, pump, and a plate-and-frame filtra- tion unit. The filter disks are fit between the plates which distribute the flow. The disks must be mounted with care to avoid fluid bypass around the disks. The system for study is solid calcium carbonate suspended in water. Procedure Initial studies should generate the volume of filtrate as a function of time; this gives basic information on the resistance of the filter medium. Unusually large values may suggest prob- lems with the mounting of the disks. The calcium carbonate slurry should be set at 0.8 weight %. Add the calcium carbon- ate to the tank while the mixer is on to obtain a good dispersion of the solid in the water. Samples of the filtrate can be collected as a function of time. The bypass valve can be 1