Comparative Testing of Slurry Monitors

Abstract

The US Department of Energy (DOE) has millions of gallons of radioactive liquid and sludge wastes that must be retrieved from underground storage tanks, transferred to treatment facilities, and processed to a final waste form. The wastes will be removed from the current storage tanks by mobilizing the sludge wastes and mixing them with the liquid wastes to create slurries. Each slurry would then be transferred by pipeline to the desired destination. To reduce the risk of plugging a pipeline, the transport properties (e.g., density, suspended solids concentration, viscosity, particle size range) of the slurry should be determined to be within acceptable limits prior to transfer. These properties should also be monitored and controlled within specified limits while the slurry transfer is in progress. The DOE issued a call for proposals for developing on-line instrumentation to measure the transport properties of slurries. In response to the call for proposals, several researchers submitted proposals and were funded to develop slurry monitoring instruments. These newly developed DOE instruments are currently in the prototype stage. Before the instruments were installed in a radioactive application, the DOE wanted to evaluate them under nonradioactive conditions to determine if they were accurate, reliable, and dependable. Themore » goal of this project was to test the performance of the newly developed DOE instruments along with several commercially available instruments. The baseline method for comparison utilized the results from grab-sample analyses.« le