Study of Oxygen Mass Transfer Coefficient in Microbial Leaching of Uranium

Abstract

Oxygen mass transfer coefficient is one of the most important parameters in the design of aerobic process bioreactor, which is represented by the overall volumetric oxygen mass transfer. The purpose of this article was the investigation of the mass transfer coefficient in the vast range of operational parameters in a stirred tank reactor. The effects of cell concentration, stirred power consumption and apparent air velocity on the mass transfer coefficient show that oxygen mass transfer in microbial leaching of uranium and in this range of parameter is not limited in these experiments. The overall volumetric oxygen mass transfer was determined in the range of 36-84 hr-1. Agreements of the suggested mathematical correlation for predicting the mass transfer were also evaluated. The results showed that the equation based on the rpm and/or power consumption and apparent air velocity specifies a good agreement with the experimental results with the coefficient of determination of R2=94.2 and 93.4. It was concluded that the introduced models are suitable for evaluation of the mass transfer coefficient in the microbial leaching of uranium.

Keywords

• mass transfer coefficient
• oxygen
• microbial leaching
• uranium
• stirred bioreactor