Example 80 Uranium

Navigation: User Guide ➔ Example Projects ➔ 80 Uranium

---

Uranium Project

Project Location

This is a Steady State project and is stored at:

..\SysCADXXX\Examples\80 Uranium\Demo Uranium Project.spf

Features Demonstrated

1. Solvent Extraction Circuit with Extraction, Stripping and Scrubbing stages.
2. Shows the use of Reaction Source & Recycle
3. Precipitation, Thickening, Centrifuging, Calcining and off gas scrubbing.
4. User Defined Species Calculations
5. The use of Makeup Source and Makeup Block (MU)
6. The use of Discard Sink and Discard Block (DB) - Added in SysCAD 9.3 Build 138
7. The use of Hot Flash Tie
8. Use of General and PID controllers
9. Example Excel Report

Brief Description

• This is a simple Uranium project containing sections of Solvent Extraction, Precipitation, Thickener, Centrifuge and Calciner. This project was created based on Naberlek Uranium Mine, Australia, as described in Australasian Mining and Metallurgy. Monograph No. 19, 1993.

Project Configuration

Setting up the Solvent Extraction Circuit

• The project is set up with Constant Pregnant Feed.
• General Controller "USX" allows user to defined the required A:O ratio for all three stages, which sets the makeup/discard, feeder and splitter flows to achieve these ratios.
• The USX controller is also used to determine the required ammonia for stripping based on reaction and excess requirements.
• PID controller "SX_Control" is used to control the acid addition.
• The Crud bleed stream is important as it allows the recirculation load be scaled down if necessary.

Specifying the Extraction Reactions

• All reactions are in sequential order (this is important).
• Looking at the reaction file, H2SO4 is consumed by the first reaction then generated by the second and third reactions. When reactions are evaluated in sequence, normally products produced by later reactions would not be used by earlier reactions, this will lead to incorrect acid usage values.
• To overcome this problem, we have added a H2SO4 reaction Source (in addition to the actual Conc Acid feed stream.) This H2SO4 reaction source will tell SysCAD to use up the acid generated by later reactions.
• For more information, please see Reaction Source & Recycle.

Setting up and Viewing User Defined Species Calculations

• One focus of this example is to show user how to add in user defined calculations for their project, once defined, the user defined calculations will be available for all the unit operations in the project.
  1. In Step 2 of Edit Configuration file, add the user defined calculations in the calculations Tab.
  2. One Species Calculation has been added for U3O8_equiv, this will be visible under the Sp Tab on the access window, shown in the project under the Calculation section.

Makeups and Discards

• Acid and Acidified Alamine are added as makeup blocks.
• Acid is made up to a predefined pH for the PGL, this predefined pH is adjusted by PID based on raffinate acid concentration. This setup improves solve speed as it is more stable.
• Discard sink is added to assist with flow reduction if required.

Excel Report

1. Example Plant Criteria Report, used to set data into SysCAD as well as reporting back the actual values from SysCAD.
2. Example Reactions Report detailing all the reaction and reaction extents used in the project.
3. Example Stream Report