Radiotracer investigation of phosphoric acid and phosphatic fertilizers production process

In the phosphoric acid production process, the time a particle spends inside the chemical reactor (residence time) is of paramount importance to process engineers. Residence time distribution (RTD) gives information on the efficiency of the chemical reactor, on the efficiency of the process, and also the availabilities of the reactive volume for the reaction (active volume vs. dead volume). Traditionally, chemical engineers used chemical tracer to determine the RTD. However, first disadvantage is that the chemical tracer could not allow an online diagnosis: the samples containing chemical tracer have to go to a lab for analysis, second disadvantage is that the chemical tracer is less sensitive than radioactive ones because of its adsorption onto strata or its retention in rocks. Consequently, chemical tracer results are not always precise and cannot convincingly explain the multiple flow-path model. Radioactive tracers are the only tracers capable of measuring the active RTD with high degree of precision and give information on the internal recirculation rate. In this work, we will describe the application of radiotracer method for RTD measurement in the phosphoric acid production process and give results and discussion of each case encountered.