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The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of River Protection’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) is being designed and built to pre-treat and then vitrify a large portion of the wastes in Hanford’s 177 underground waste storage tanks. The WTP consists of three primary facilities—pretreatment, low-activity waste (LAW) vitrification, and high-level waste (HLW) vitrification. The pretreatment facility will receive waste piped from the Hanford tank farms and separate it into a high-volume, low-activity liquid stream stripped of most solids and radionuclides and a much smaller volume of HLW slurry containing most of the solids and most of the radioactivity. Many of the vessels in the pretreatment facility will contain pulse jet mixers (PJM) that will provide some or all of the mixing in the vessels. Pulse jet mixer technology was selected for use in black cell regions of the WTP, where maintenance cannot be performed once hot testing and operations commence. The PJMs have no moving mechanical parts that require maintenance. The vessels with the most concentrated slurries will also be mixed with air spargers and/or steady jets in addition to the mixing provided by the PJMs. Pulse jet mixers are susceptible to overblows that can generate large hydrodynamic forces, forces more » that can damage mixing vessels or their internal parts. The probability of an overblow increases if a PJM does not fill completely. The purpose of the testing performed for this report was to determine how reliable and repeatable the primary and safety (or backup) PJM control systems are at detecting drive overblows (DOB) and charge vessel full (CVF) conditions. Testing was performed on the ABB 800xA and Triconex control systems. The controllers operated an array of four PJMs installed in an approximately 13 ft diameter × 15 ft tall tank located in the high bay of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) 336 Building test facility. The PJMs were fitted with 4 inch diameter discharge nozzles representative of the nozzles to be used in the WTP. This work supplemented earlier controller tests done on PJMs with 2 inch nozzles (Bontha et al. 2007). Those earlier tests enabled the selection of appropriate pressure transmitters with associated piping and resulted in an alternate overblow detection algorithm that uses data from pressure transmitters mounted in a water flush line on the PJM airlines. Much of that earlier work was only qualitative, however, due to a data logger equipment failure that occurred during the 2007 testing. The objectives of the current work focused on providing quantitative determinations of the ability of the BNI controllers to detect DOB and CVF conditions. On both control systems, a DOB or CVF is indicated when the values of particular internal functions, called confidence values, cross predetermined thresholds. There are two types of confidence values; one based on a transformation of jet pump pair (JPP) drive and suction pressures, the other based on the pressure in the flush line. In the present testing, we collected confidence levels output from the ABB and Triconex controllers. These data were analyzed in terms of the true and noise confidence peaks generated during multiple cycles of DOB and CVF events. The distributions of peak and noise amplitudes were compared to see if thresholds could be set that would enable the detection of DOB and CVF events at high probabilities, while keeping false detections to low probabilities. Supporting data were also collected on PJM operation, including data on PJM pressures and levels, to provide direct experimental evidence of when PJMs were filling, full, driving, or overblowing. « less

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of River Protection’s Waste Treatment Plant (WTP) is being designed and built to pretreat and then vitrify a large portion of the wastes in Hanford’s 177 underground waste storage tanks. The WTP consists of three primary facilities: pretreatment, low-activity waste (LAW) vitrification, and high-level waste (HLW) vitrification. The pretreatment facility will receive waste feed from the Hanford tank farms and separate it into 1) a high-volume, low-activity liquid stream stripped of most solids and radionuclides and 2) a much smaller volume of HLW slurry containing most of the solids and most of the radioactivity. Many of the vessels in the pretreatment facility will contain pulse jet mixers (PJMs) that will provide some or all of the mixing in the vessels. This technology was selected for use in so-called “black cell” regions of the WTP, where maintenance capability will not be available for the operating life of the WTP. PJM technology was selected for use in these regions because it has no moving mechanical parts that require maintenance. The vessels with the most concentrated slurries will also be mixed with air spargers and/or steady jets in addition to the mixing provided by the PJMs. This report contains the results of single and multiple PJM overblow tests conducted in a large, ~13 ft-diameter × 15-ft-tall tank located in the high bay of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) 336 Building test facility. These single and multiple PJM overblow tests were conducted using water and a clay simulant to bound the lower and upper rheological properties of the waste streams anticipated to be processed in the WTP. Hydrodynamic pressures were measured at a number of locations in the test vessel using an array of nine pressure sensors and four hydrophones. These measurements were made under normal and limiting vessel operating conditions (i.e., maximum PJM fluid emptying velocity, maximum and minimum vessel contents for PJM operation, and maximum and minimum rheological properties). Test data collected from the PJM overblow tests were provided to Bechtel National, Inc. (BNI) for assessing hydrostatic, dynamic, and acoustic pressure loadings on in-tank structures during 1) single overblows; 2) multiple overlapping overblows of two to four PJMs; 3) simultaneous overblows of pairs of PJMs.