Predicting Water Activity for Complex Wastes with Solvation Cluster Equilibria (SCE) - 12042
- Columbia Energy and Environmental Services, Inc., Richland, WA 99354 (United States)
- Washington River Protection Solutions, Richland, WA 99354 (United States)
- Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, 47906 (United States)
Predicting an electrolyte mixture's water activity, i.e. the ratio of water vapor pressure over a solution with that of pure water, in principle reveals both boiling point and solubilities for that mixture. Better predictions of these properties helps support the ongoing missions to concentrate complex nuclear waste mixtures in order to conserve tank space and improved predictions of water activity will help. A new approach for predicting water activity, the solvation cluster equilibria (SCE) model, uses pure electrolyte water activities to predict water activity for a complex mixture of those electrolytes. An SCE function based on electrolyte hydration free energy and a standard Debye- Hueckel (DH) charge compression fits each pure electrolyte's water activity with three parameters. Given these pure electrolyte water activities, the SCE predicts any mixture water activity over a large range of concentration with an additional parameter for each mixture vector, the multinarity. In contrast to ionic strength, which scales with concentration, multinarity is related to the relative proportion of electrolytes in a mixture and can either increase or decrease the water activity prediction over a broad range of concentration for that mixture. The SCE model predicts water activity for complex electrolyte mixtures based on the water activities of pure electrolytes. Three parameter SCE functions fit the water activities of pure electrolytes and along with a single multinarity parameter for each mixture vector then predict the mixture water activity. Predictions of water activity can in principle predict solution electrolyte activity and this relationship will be explored in the future. Predicting electrolyte activities for complex mixtures provides a means of determining solubilities for each electrolyte. Although there are a number of reports [9, 10, 11] of water activity models for pure and binary mixtures of electrolytes, none of them compare measured versus calculated water activity for more complex mixtures. (authors)
- Research Organization:
- WM Symposia, 1628 E. Southern Avenue, Suite 9-332, Tempe, AZ 85282 (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 22293379
- Report Number(s):
- INIS-US-14-WM-12042; TRN: US14V1032114903
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: WM2012: Waste Management 2012 conference on improving the future in waste management, Phoenix, AZ (United States), 26 Feb - 1 Mar 2012; Other Information: Country of input: France; 11 refs.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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