good morning and welcome to today's webinar at Co modular located here in Houston thank you for joining us holiday season uh today we're going to be talking about extracting uh critical materials as you may be aware over the years we've seen an increase in clean energy technology development as well as other high-tech devices therefore the demand for minerals metals and R of elements utilizing the manufactur of these products as outstripped Supply at the table on the right from the doe cost the criticality of materials as it relates to the importance of energy and overall Supply risk many of these Coke modular has direct experiences such as lithium Cobalt nickel magnes eum to name a few our subject matter experts will discuss coch Modell's solent extraction technology which replaces traditional mixer settlers offering an advantage solution for the recovery of critical materials and aiding to meet growing demand our presenters today our subject matters on extraction technology um Don our Mader of extraction will be speaking first he holds a BS in chemical engineering from rensler Polytech Institute and MBA from Fairly Dickinson University brings over 30 years of experience in evaluating and optimizing extraction processes and scaling up and design of extraction systems supporting Don will be Brendon our principal extraction engineer who holds a BS in chemical engineer uh engineering from Columbia University and brings over 15 years of experience Brandon is responsible for extraction application evaluation process development and pilot test design extraction column design commissioning and process startup so a little bit about cook modular if you're not familiar with us we're joint venture with Coke glitch we bring over 40 years of experience uh to the chemical processing industry we support most uh Industries whether it be special chemicals Mining and metals pharmaceutical if there's a chemical involved we we support that industry uh our core capabilities are divided into three buckets first and foremost is process engineering our compan is comprised mostly of chemical engineers and companies come to us either at f one or fl2 stage to help them um fully bake their processes and solve separations challenges and also they come to us for our extraction technology which we which we'll be talking about today second they come to us for a pilot plant facility located here in Houston Texas with over 5,000 square feet of pilot test uh space there we can run pilot testing to support uh proof of concept selection and commercialization and scale up activities you basically take drum quantities and process that our pilot plant both Don and Brandon will be talking more about our pilot plant shortly and ultimately we do deliver our projects modularly so we don't stick build anything and there's various um benefits to building modular uh which we can always you know answer your questions at a later date if you have any U before we get started we did have uh two poll questions uh let me let me share the first poll question so on the right hand side you'll see um the poll questions um basically you know how familiar how familiar are you with liquid to liquid solvent extraction are you familiar with this technology maybe you've heard of it but you're not familiar or you're not familiar at all and U you'll be learning a lot from this from this webinar we'll just give everyone a few seconds to answer the poll questions we see some coming in now let see just about there okay looks like the majority of Y all are familiar with with liquid to liquid extraction it's about 21 64% are familiar uh 30 30ish perent have heard of it but not familiar about 3% are not familiar great thank you and the next question is you know as it relates to the recovery of of critical materials are you familiar with the application of extraction technology for the recovery of critical materials let me um share that poll question so again are you familiar with that application to the recovery of critical materials um maybe you've heard about that application but not familiar or not familiar at all so let's see what we're seeing here okay great so seems like there's a few more that are not familiar with that application so that's good to know great thank you thank you for answering those poll questions um you'll see a chat window on the right hand side as we go through this presentation if you do have any questions please enter those um those questions in the chat window and at the end of the the end of the webinar we'll answer as many questions as we can afterwards and then if you may be asking will we will we be providing a copy of this presentation we will be providing a copy after this thank you I'll hand this over to to Doc uh good morning everyone at least this morning here in New Jersey uh so to start out we just want to make sure everybody's familiar with what extraction is this slide shows basically uh the simplest form of liquid liquid extraction you have a feed and a solvent that are imiss and you have something in the feed we would call that a solute in this particular example it's component C so when you bring the feed and solvent together you mix them together you're affecting a mass transfer of that solute from the feed into the solvent and then you want to separate the two phases after that you've transferred to reach steady state and you get what we call an extract phase that's the solvent that has picked up the solute and then you have a raffinate phase which is the feed that is given up the solute so basically what you're looking at here then is what we call one theoretical stage of liquid liquid extraction and one of the key factors in in in in evaluating this is the distribution coefficient which is how well the solute which in the critical Metals we're talking talking about probably Metals how well it distributes between the solvent phase and the feed phase or the extract and the raffinate so the distribution coefficient then is the concentration of the solute in the extract divided by the concentration in the raffinate phase obviously the the best extraction is to find a solvent with as high a distribution coefficient as possible you know for the material that you're trying to remove then we have something called an extra raction Factor that's just the distribution coefficient times the solvent to feed ratio we typically Target a minimum extraction factor of about 1.3 and you know I'm not going to cover exactly why in this seminar but there is a good reason for you know targeting that and then in especially in metals extraction we have something called a separation Factor that's when you have various components very a number of solutes different Metals for instance in your feed and you want to separate them and you use a separation factor which is the distribution coefficient of one metal divided by the distribution coefficient of another you know obviously the better the separation Factor the less stages you're going to need to do that separation so we have two ways we'll point out about doing liquid liquid extraction one is by using a series of mixer settlers and you see what we show here is four in Series where the feed comes in on the left side and the solvent comes in in the fourth stage on the right side and then that solvent becomes the extract from the fourth stage going back to the third stage and so on in a true countercurrent fashion so again this would show four the uh agitated stages of of a mixer settler however our strength is really in column type contractors here instead of having a series of mixer settlers you have a single extraction column you bring the feed in one end of the column and the solvent in the other end we're showing this case the feed being the heavy phase so it would come in at the top of the column the solvent being the light phase it would come in at the bottom of the column and then as these two phases flow counter currently in this column you want to do something in here to create theoretical stages which every theoretical stage then would replace one of those mixer settlers in an extraction column you have two phases you have a continuous phase and a dispersed phase in this example we're showing the feed come in it fills the column so it's the continuous phase the solvent comes in it's broken up as droplets which flow up through the continuous phase to a primary interface at the top so that would be the disperse phase and selection of continuous disperse phases quite critical you know to optimize the performance of an extraction process we'll talk a little bit more about about that later we like to generate liquid liquid equilibrium data as I showed you in the pre the first Slide the the liquid liquid equilibrium data is the distribution coefficient we like to use a round bottom reaction type flask as shown in the picture that's jacketed so we can put the feed and the solvent into this vessel at a specific ratio the jacket can control the temperature we then would mix these two phases together long enough to reach a steady state or equilibrium and we find that could be as low as 2 minutes sometimes it is a little longer so when you reach steady state you turn the agitator off you let the uh two phases separate you take a sample of each phase you do your analytical and that gives you your distribution coefficient at a specific concentration we put the binate back in it's at lower concentration put fresh solvent back in mix it again separate it again and we like to do that process as many times as necessary to get from the feed concentration to the raffinate concentration that you're looking for uh typically we look to do it maybe five or six times so in addition to the raw data the the distribution coefficient another thing we're looking for when we do this work is how easily these phases separate when you turn the agitator off is it seconds or is it many minutes or even an hour or whatever for these phases to separate that's very critical to learn during this stage of of your uh process development we also like to know what's happening at the interface do you form solids at the interface that drop out a solution do you have an Emulsion band as the two phases do not want to separate instantaneously you know all of these qualitative observations are really important for coch modular as we look Downstream especially to what type of Downstream equipment uh specifically what type of extraction column we want to use in scaling up any extraction process so when you're doing these mix and decants uh in that vessel what you're really generating is your equilibrium curve shown here on the right why being the concentration of the solute say the metal in the solvent phase or the extract phase and X being the concentration in the feed or the raffinate phase so every time you mix and decant you're starting at a higher point on this blue line and generating a point lower and lower on your equilibrium curve once you have that now you're say you're operating your extraction column where your feed comes in the top solving in the bottom now you can once this reaches steady state you can generate your operating line now this operating line the upper point on this operating line is here at the top right that's where the feed comes in the concentration of the feed and where the extract goes out the other end of the operating line down here that's where the solvent comes in and the renate goes out so now you draw your equilibrium Curve Your operating line and you use like a mcade teal method to then step off the theoretical stages that are going to be required now I'm going to let Brendan take over talking a little bit more about uh specifically what is used for Metals thanks Don so often when you have a metals or critical minerals solvent extraction process um you have an extractant and a diluent and the extractant and the diluent comprise the solvent in most of these processes um the most simple definition I can think of for an extractant um is an organic reagent in an organic liquid that reacts with a metal which allows it to be extracted from the egis phase to the organic phase and the diluent is the liquid um in which that reagents dissolves and typically this is a petroleum distillate the classic example of a diluent for many metals extraction processes is kerosene on the bottom of the slide we're showing a very common extractant um this is copper extraction using a phenolic oxim extractant here we have two of those on the left and right of the bottom picture of this slide and they form the complex with copper which allows it to be extracted into the organic phase so you may be wondering how to select an extractant and how to select a valent I think the first thing to do when you're looking to select an extractant to perform some testing and develop a solving extraction process is just to conduct the literature search at first um if you're developing a process there's a good chance that um other researchers and industries have looked into similar applications in the past and by conducting this search it can kind of narrow down extractants and typical processes for what you're trying to develop once you have that narrowed down a little bit um the next thing you want to look for is how effective that extractant could be at extracting the metal out that you're interested in and really that's the distribution coefficient that Don talked about earlier um if you have an aquous stream that has lots of other components in it like other metals you also want to have be mindful of how selective the extractant may be at extracting the metal that you're interested in versus the other on um and this is really where the separation Factor comes into play that Don also talked about a little bit earlier you also want to be mindful of the cost of the extractant and how available it is um over the years some extractants that were produced years ago that might be a good fit May no longer be produced and if they're no longer produced and commercially available it's going to leave lead to a very expensive process so it's something you always want to have kind of in the back of your mind as you're developing a process and looking for an extract them you also want to have a feel for if possible um how easy it is to transfer the metal in from the organic back into the aquous so you can produce a product stream with that metal so it can be recovered Downstream to solve an extraction process that's a little bit harder um to to learn from literature search but sometimes it's talked about also kinetics and stability is something you want to be mindful of as well if you can find that information um Kinetics I really just mean how quickly it'll form that complex with the solid so it can be extracted because that has to happen first before it can actually be pulled into the organic phase and then if the extractant is stable um during operation and what may impact degradation Like Oxygen temperature pH if that's a concern there's not as many keys I don't think for selecting a dent um ideally you want to use something that's cheap commercially available um has low Mis ability in the aquous so you don't have to spend um or incorporate a lot of unit operations to recover it and you also want to be mindful if it has an impact on the extractant certain diluents can degrade um the extractant um and it can impact its selectivity as well so many of you have probably seen these These are extractant isotherms and and Don kind of mentioned this earlier when he was talking about performing liquid liquid equilibrium tests as you perform tests you can generate these um and these are also published in literature and this will also help you easily select an extractant or a series of extractants for developing a process and you can usually they're shown kind of like this where you have percent extraction on the y axis and then pH on the x-axis or a function of the acid concentration like chloride concentration um these are available in literature um and the manufacturers of extractants like BF salt salv and itel also publish these in their technical data sheets which can be requested from them um it's a really good way to select extractants um to find ones that extract the metal that you're interested in how selective they are prior to performing liquid liquid equilibrium tests also by looking at these you can kind of put a process concept together say a block flow diagram of a series of extraction columns as you're developing the process and before performing liquid liquid equipment tests they don't by themselves provide kinetic data and um often I think they can be a bit misleading in terms of how easy it is to strip a metal out of a loaded organic stream so that's the extract of the metal in it um and because of that performing liquid liquid equilibrium tests are absolutely critical um but this is certainly a good starting point in developing a process and selecting extractants and with that I'm going to turn it over to back to Don who's going to go through some of the uh the common types of extraction equipment in our technology um that can be used for critical minerals and metals extraction processes yeah this slide just is an overall coverall slide that shows all the types of equipment typically used for liquid liquid extraction what we have in red there is what we as a company typically would Supply and really we look we primarily focus on the rotating and reciprocating these type of agitated extraction columns although we have in fact provided mixer settlers you know in some instances for liquid liquid extraction so this is uh basically what you see here on the left I've been in copper mines and this is kind of what you you see in a copper mine uh if you're doing copper extraction and it's very large vessels couple of thousand gallon mixing chamber large settling chamber olympic size swimming pools almost and so they're so large that's why you only see maybe five or six of these out there in the field but they handle very high flow rates they're good for processes that have a reaction extraction because you control the residence time in these mixing Chambers pretty easy to control the pH as well some of the drawbacks at a large floor space required and also the large solvent inventory that becomes a pretty critical component of your cap xes loading the system up with solvent when you start up so typically like I said typically you're going to get only a few theoretical stages in large mixer settlers like this as far as we're concerned we have two major types of columns we like to to promote specifically for Metals extraction and that would be the first one is the shyal column it's shown here on the right I'll show you some actual internal pictures in a minute but it's a series of turban impellers with a lot of baffling so a very efficient extraction column uh is in fact it's the most efficient column Based on data published in the literature capacity is reasonable uh we're showing it to be you know maybe 15 to 25 meters Cub per met Square hour that's if you take the feed rate plus the solvent rate and divide it by the cross-sectional area of the column that's one of the things we find out during pilot testing by the way uh when we're scaling up and it also has an excellent turn down down to four to one I say here it's best suited when you need a lot of theoretical stages that's because it's a very efficient extraction column in organic extraction we typically see maybe four to six agitated stages for theoretical in the metals extraction it tends to be a little bit more maybe seven eight nine 10 agitated stages per theoretical stage but that's still very efficient when you're putting it all in one place like this and that's why we've done some it says Rare Earth we've done some rare earth extraction in shal CMS like this we don't highly recommend this for fouling systems or systems that tend to emulsify although it will handle those but I'll be talking about our car Cal in a minute and that's really the device that works best in those types of systems so what you see here is the internal cartridge for a shyal colum on the left this you're seeing the what we call the inner baffles and then the turban impeller between those inner baffles the outer baffles would be welded to the inside wall of the vessel when this is slipped in and that's because this is 6 and 1/2 ft in diameter anything bigger than 6 foot that's the way we build it however if it's going to be less than 6 foot we typically make a full cartridge now here you can see what a full stage looks like you have the outer baffles with a Teflon Edge so when we slip this in that's what's going to seal it at the wall of the vessel and then you can kind of see the inner baffles and the turbine impeller in there so if you look over here you can get a pretty good picture of what the turbine is just a flat bade blade turban impeller uh but very very efficient like I said for for liquid liquid extraction ction the largest car Shalom we built is the shown here this was a 10 foot diameter about 3 meter diameter column you can see it was 130 feet tall 40 mmers can see it when it was set up on the right there so what could this would typically handle maybe 650 to 700 gallons per minute combined flow of bulk phases so it put pretty pretty large large throughputs through a column of this size the other column I wanted to mention of course is the car column instead of having rotating internals now we have a plate stack that reciprocates up and down okay it has a very high open area therefore the capacity is somewhat higher than a shyal column its efficiency is not quite as good it has a good turn down but the key to the car column is the uniform Shear mixing and with the uniform Shear mixing we create a much more uniform particle size distribution inside this column and therefore we find that this mixing action works best when you have systems that have slow phase separation and tend to emulsify very easily so you know again if if if the interfacial tension's low if the density difference is low typically the car column is going to be a better device for those also we've been able to handle suspended solids very easily in a carom up to 40% slurries we've put through caroms and that's because there's nothing that there's no dead zone in here this whole plate stack is always moving and so it will handle solids very very nicely this you're seeing here is a plate stack that is just under a meter you can see it's a whole series of per plates and they have you can see one here on the left large holes large open area and they're spaced in this case about 50 m 50 millimet apart on this plate stack we also have spider plates you see one the one on the end over here but there's three of them on in this plate stack one on each end one in the middle so that when we put it together with these tie rods that's what makes this a rigid structure inside that column and then on the right there you can see this was a very tall plate stack that was getting ready to be installed inside an extraction a car column here's the largest carom we've ever built it's a 7 foot in diameter which is just basically just about a little over 3 meters and you can see this again is being raised by a crane to be put inside the extraction column another interesting thing you can see in this picture here on the left is that we have uh varied the spacing between the perf plates very dramatically from one end of the column to the next here and that's because when we tested this we optim ize the performance by changing the mixing intensity you know at different locations inside this column so that's something we learned uh during pilot testing that we're going to talk about a little later on and with that I'll turn it back to brending so I'm G to go through two classic uh Metals solve and extraction processes um and how we can use agitated extraction columns like a car or a shival um in place of mixer sellers for those processes as they're kind of tradition traditionally designed so the first one is a copper solvent extraction process and this really um is just two unit operations from the extraction perspective extraction and stripping so you have a copper ore or waste stream that's Conta acted with um some acid which is kind of on the left hand side of the slide that forms a pregnant liquor an aquous stream that's rich in Copper and is very acidic that goes to the extraction step which is shown in blue um that pregnant liquor contacted with an organic solvent um containing a diluent and an extractant the extractant probably being one of the licks uh series of extractants that generates a stripped organic which has copper within it um that stripped organic leaving that extraction um Step goes to a stripping step where the loaded organic here shown as this um is contacted with an aquous solution and that aquous solution takes the copper out of the loaded organic um and generates an aquous stream that's rich in Copper that stream can go to an electrowinning step down stream um which will will pull the copper out of solution and spend a electrolyte or water leaving that electrowinning step goes back to the stripping step so not only does the stripping step um yields kind of a copper aquous product stream but it also regenerates a solvent that can be used back in the extraction step so if you were to design this process using um agitated extraction columns like shyal or car it would look something like this where you have the aquous feed coming in here on the left um going into the first extraction column or copper is extracted out of this pregnant liquor stream um with an organic solvent containing an extractant and a dent loaded organic leaves um that extraction common it flows through a stripping column an aquous stripping solution goes into the top of that stripping column yielding an aquous product stream rich in Copper and it also generates regenerated solvent which flows back to the first column and an aquous raffinate stream leaves the bottom of this column um which could go back to that reductive leech step um Upstream this process to contact the ore and generate the pregnant liquor another classic um solvent extraction process is the recovery of cobalt and nickel from an aquous speed stream um on this slide it's shown with a series of mixer settlers 12 in total um and it's kind of divided into four different steps two extraction steps and two stripping steps so on the right um we have the first extraction step where we're looking to extract Cobalt and nickel out of the aquous speed stream using an organic solvent leaving this step is an aquous raffinate stream which will contain some impurity so really here you're liberating the Cobalt and nickel away from the impurities in this aquous stram that flows to step B which is a stripping step which pulls the Cobalt and nickel out of that loaded organic stream which then flows onto step C using a stripping solution and then the regenerated solvent from Step B flows back to step a to again counter to extract Cobalt nickel from the feed stream moving on to step C here's where we strip Cobalt and nickel um or we have Cobalt and nickel coming into this step where it's it's extracted the Cobalt is extracted out using a different organic solvent um and then it's stripped out in stepd so leaving stepd you have a Cobalt product stream that's an aquous solution and then leaving step C you have a raffinate stream that's rich in nickel so leaving this process you have two product streams really a Cobalt a Cobalt Rich aquous stream and then a nickel rich Stream So if you were to design this process using extraction columns it would look something like this and this is a little bit easier to follow in my opinion so looking at um column A which is the extraction step here we extract Cobalt nickel out of that sulfate feed solution that loaded organic stream flows to the next column um where it is stripped out um with an acidic aquous solution um leaving the top of this column is the regenerated solvent which flows back to column A to extract the Cobalt and nickel out and then also leaving column A is that aquous raffinate which contains those impurities in the aquous Stream that were coming into the process looking at columns C and D um now we have this acous stream containing Cobalt and nickel leaving this stripping column we want to extract the Cobalt out of that so we're using a different solvent here here we extract Co we have a different loaded organic stream that's now rich in Cobalt we have a different stripping solution here this is most likely just a neutral water stripping solution this yields a dripped liquor which is rich in Cobalt so this is one product stream here um and then we also have regenerated solvent going back to col seed for Cobalt extraction and then the aquous raffinate stream leaving this like the other foow diagram is a nickel Rich product stream so so you may be wondering why use solvent extraction agitated solvent extraction columns versus traditional mix of settlers and there's a lot of reasons to take this approach um one is an overall reduced installed cost so a single extraction column can replace greater than 10 mixer settlers and because of that you're just going to have like one rotating piece of equipment as opposed to say 10 mixer settlers well you'll have a rotating impeller for each of them and since it's a single extraction column performing um the same operation as 10 mixer settlers you'll have less Motors less pumps instruments and piping are required and typically like Don was discussing earlier um a a bank of mixer sellers is going to take up a fair amount of area and one extraction CL by itself will take up much much less footprint um also related to just the inherent nature and design of extraction columns is that you're going to have less solvent um used in the system um and there's a couple reasons of that you can add additional theoretical stages which will reduce the solvent to feed ratio so by that alone you're going to reduce the amount of solvent in the system also in an extraction column you basically only have one settling section at the top or the bottom of the column as opposed to a series of mixer settlers which has a settling section for each so because of that you're going to have way more volume and so because of both those things you're going to have a reduced solvent um volume requirement for an extraction column as opposed to a series of mix of settlers and because there's less solvent you're going to reach equilibrium much faster um as a system will process and reach steady States because there's less volume and less residence time within that system extraction columns by their nature um are completely enclosed so because of that um they're inherently kind of safer designs um quite often now it's say older mixer settler systems can be just open to the atmosphere which makes them hazardous extraction coms you know by their designer completely enclos so they're safer um and they can also be incorporated into modular systems which is our typical approach and um Control Systems could be designed for additional process safety like Don discussed earlier um if you have a process that has a strong tendency to emulsify one of the benefits of going with an extra traction column is that you can use a car column which is the perfect fit for systems that have that tendency if you have a mixer settler with a rotating impeller it may be difficult to design the system to run well and also not multiply both phases um also within an extraction column you have a single controlled liquid look interface at the top of the bottom so anything that can happen at an interface and Don will touch on this a little bit when he talks about pilot testing like a rag layer crud build up um or an emultion band that's only going to happen in one place within an extraction column as opposed to say you had six mixer settlers in series it could happen at the interface and all of them which can be problematic during operation pilot testing uh Mauricio touched on a little bit and Don's going to discuss further but we have a dedicated pilot plant in um Houston for developing solvent extraction processes and it's really critical to to um to run a pilot test we run pilot tests here often with both shyal and car columns um and we use that to scale up to commercial designs which are offered with a process performance guaranteed also as as maceio mentioned in the uh beginning of today's presentation shivel and caroms can be easily incorporated into a modular system um and those can be delivered to remote locations um and they typically have a small foot print associated with them so another benefit there is if you're looking for whatever reason to have a process with a small footprint associated with it say you're looking to put a process into an existing chemical plant or within an existing building um extraction comps being moded are really beneficial for that with that said I'm going to turn this back over to uh don who's going to discuss pilot test yeah so we we are very we're very important pilot testing is very important to us and you can see in the black there when we can run a successful pilot test we can give a performance guarantee for any liquid liquid extraction equipment that we Supply and there's a bunch of reasons that you know you can't design accurately without running a pilot test and there some of them are just listed right here you know not knowing which phase should be continuous and which should be dispersed uh and then whether you're going to get entrainment I mean um interface uh with a rag layer which crud layer you might call it in an SX or an Emulsion band and here in the pictures on the right you can see very clearly uh the top one shows an Emulsion band when we were running this extraction column an Emulsion would build up at the interface now during testing we can see how we can control this interface this emotion band you know how most effectively and uh also you can have solids building up at the interface and again you would not know this unless you running a pilot test and again we would have ways of handling either of these two things in a commercial column during testing we're looking for entrainment we're looking for the flood point which helps us find the maximum capacity but also during pilot test we need to find what capacity that we're going to run at and the efficiency of the extraction column so that we can scale it up and provide the column that's going to meet the requirements our pilot plan and Brendan is there right now by the way is in Houston Texas and he as you mentioned for extraction we typically will test car and shyal columns quite often uh car comms can be 1 in 2 inch 3 inch shal comms are usually 3 inch if necessary we can provide the downstream distillation testing but that's not often required for Metals extraction we have a lot of analytical capabilities because while we're testing we like to analyze the samples as we go it helps us to do what we call a stepbystep optimization as opposed to a you know experimental design which we find much more efficient and takes a lot less material and time now if there's things that we can't analyze in our pilot plant we're in Houston there's a lot of analytical labs you know so we do work with labs to do an analysis outside if necessary this is just what a typical single column extraction test would look like in our pilot plant we take your material right out of feed feed drums or solvent drums that are shipped to us we pump it through a heat exchanger to control the temperature we use mass flow meters to to Monitor and and then control the uh the flow rate into the extraction column now the other critical key here is this this column is almost always a glass shell column because when you can see what's going on during the extraction process throughout this column it makes it much easier to you know to optimize the performance to see what things you have to modify and optimize in order to get the best performance in that extraction column it helps you certainly to see when you're going to flood that column and when interpace behavior is going to be problematic so this like I said is a very typical sometimes when we have uh you know multiple steps though we can set up multiple extraction columns in series as well uh to study that with that said I want to talk about uh one specific example of where we did a pilot plant test and then supplied an extraction column to replace some mixer settlers in a in a in a Metals plant and this was a filament they were this actually Metals Recycling they were taking filaments digesting it in a strong acid and then going through extraction to recover the uh the metal of interest in this particular case so this is what their process looked like they have three stages of extraction a AA then they had three stages of washing and the reason they needed these wash stages is because coming out of this third extractor the organic phase would always have too much entrained water in it aquous phase and that would carry impurities and things with it so they had to have two stages of water wash to make sure that they could could you know remove those impurities and the stripping was very simple so they had a single stage for the stripping step well they came to us because these three mixer settlers were very badly corroding and they needed to be replaced plus they were open head open top mixer settlers and therefore it was a safety concern so they were very interested in replacing those with an extraction column so we took their feed we took their solvent we set up a shyal column a 3-in diameter shy col in our pilot plant and in a one-week test program we basically optimized the performance of that shyal column generated the data we needed to scale up to you know for the commercial design and with a performance guarantee but one other very interesting thing we found out during our testing is that with the D column and designing it correctly and I'll show that in a minute we could eliminate any of this water entrainment going over to the uh to the uh you know the step B here where they were water washing out the entrained uh impurities that were carrying over and so by doing that by eliminating these you eliminate this waste stream and that was a big help to them you know obviously minimization of waste treatment is always you know a significant portion of of any uh process so when we were all said and done we uh we optimized the performance in the pilot test that would be the capacity which sets the diameter the solvent to feed ratio the height of the Comm or number of agitated stages we needed and this case it was 20 agitated stages and of course the agitation speed and we once we optimize that we used our standard scale up you can see the column here on the right that we designed it was a about 54 in it was 54 in or 50 in in in diameter and the agitated Zone was a little bit more than 13 fet like I said it was only 20 agitated stages but you can see at the top here what we did we put this huge expanded end at the top and that's where we knocked out any of that entrained water because we slowed the velocity now of the liquid leaving the top of the column and that allowed those entrained droplets to drop back into the agitated column and again once we installed this in the plant it meant they did not need that wash uh step and this column now has been operating successfully uh for the past 13 years so with that I'll turn the second uh example over to uh back to Brendan so the the last pilot Test example we want to discuss today was a two-step solve and extraction process to remove halogenated compounds from a Wastewater feed stream um this is really similar to The Copper solvent extraction process um I went through earlier granted that the uh what we're looking to recover here isn't copper but a different compound um the goals of this was really just to yield a Wastewater stream that contained less than 50 Parts re billion um of the halogenated compounds and that's leaving the first extraction column on the bottom and then also to really reduce um the total volume of that halogenated compound leaving the process so that's the two Downstream processing stream on the right leaving that second second stripping column um so we tested this uh in our pilot plant in Houston and we used both extraction column technology so this is a good example where one process made sense for the shival and then the other process made sense for the car um the shyal colum was selected for the extraction step because it had a high density difference between both phases and when we conducted liquid liquid equilibrium test for this process we observed a fast phase separation time um the opposite was true with the stripping step um where we're covering the solvent we saw slow phas separation time there and we also had experienced with similar processes that tended to multiply this test was both done in glass columns it's a 60 sage shyal and a one inch diameter car with 12 fet PL stack height we did have c276 internals in the sh because the feed was a bit corrosive and really the key here what I'm showing on the bottom is that we wanted to reduce the amount of solvent used in the extraction step for the shival and then also really reduce the Koh solution which is used in the stripping column just to really concentrate uh um those extracted halogenic compounds and have a low volumetric um stream leaving that stripping column to reduce the overall Downstream processing cost um whenever we run a pilot test and and Don kind of mentioned this we perform a series of runs to optimize each extraction column that we're we're testing I'm not going to go through all of the runs here just kind of in the interest of time but what we found was that we were able to um make spec in the extraction step first by using fresh solvent and then by using regenerated solvent we tested two different feed streams the second free stream was a little bit more difficult to to get all the compounds out than the first um and then we ran a production run using that second feed to generate a bunch of loaded organic which we use to test out the stripping step and then we ran that stripping step long enough to generate regenerated solvent um so so we could do one more extraction step just to show that the entire process works um we did not scale up this process but we generated all the data from it so that a modular solve and extraction system um could be designed built and un offered with a process performance guarantee I did want to mention today um that we have a good video up on YouTube that goes through um the car column um essentially a lot of the things that Don discussed earlier when he was talking about pilot testing you kind of see that it's about a 10-minute video and if you have time absolutely worth a watch and we have a QR code down here at the bottom which can be scanned or if you just go to YouTube and search for car extraction column it should come right up and then Don and I have also written several articles over the years um some of those are shown here um and if there's interest we can provide a PDF of today's presentation so these can be reviewed hey thank you Don Brandon appreciate you sharing that information with us we do have some time for some questions we could receive a bunch of questions if we don't get the opportunity to address all these questions in the next 10 minutes I will definitely follow up with those answers and then also we will be providing a link to the video recording of this presentation and um also copy of the webinar slide deck let's go ahead and ask a few questions uh first one is for the solids that do end up building up do they build up in the column or go out with the raffinate or organic well let me answer that one typically if they build up at the interface which is where we usually see solids building up in an extraction column then when we design the commercial equipment we always put nozzles around the interface and therefore we have you know as that solids builds up at the interface over time you can you can draw that liquid off go through a side filter and return that liquid back into the extraction column what we have found in most cases where this is done commercially it's not something that's done all the time it's they learn that maybe once a day once a shift even once a week they might have to you know draw some liquid off the interface filter out those solids and then return it back to the column um it when you see it in the column it looks like a lot of solids but when you filter it it turns out oftentimes not to be very much solids so I mean that's mostly how we have seen uh the solids build up in extraction columns and how we've handled it great and I would just add to that if if there is significant suspended solids and they don't build up at the interface they flow out with the bottom going out with the the heavy face stream leaving the bottom of the column A Car column is probably the right approach for that type of system and pilot testing of course is is critical to to learn about the process and and observe these things thank you another question is um how do you monitor the deg ation of the extractant since most of the vendors don't provide the details of what solvent it is or its properties so I think that the key here really is continuous pilot testing so if you have a Sol and extraction process which has two columns and series being able to operate it continuously and taking samples and measuring the concentration of the extractant and Performing material balances around it that's a really good way to see if it's degrading or not so I think pilot testing there is is really critical okay another one is what is meant by turn down Capa uh capability yeah when I talked about turn down like typically you might design a column for a certain capacity you know you know let's say 100 gallons a minute but you know certainly during startup you might only be running at 50 gallons a minute or whatever so you know if you design it for 100 gallons a minute what I'm saying on a 4 to1 turndown is if you run it as low as 25 gallons a minute it will still operate at Peak Capac Peak efficiency so it just means you can run over a broad range of operating capacities and maintain the same efficiency and the reason you can do that with an agitated column is because you have control of the agitation speed as you change capacity you would change the vitation speed which again keeps the efficiency you know basically constant okay another question is what are the energy requirements and footprint of a shable versus a conventional SX so the the energy requirements of a shival or a car these are lowp speeed devices so I'd say that most Sho columns it is a bit diameter and size dependent but most of them I would say operate at and a half or two horsepower that's kind of the size of the motor and then most car columns would probably be less than five horsepower so these are not high-speed devices like a centrifugal extractor or something like that these are lowp speed devices and they have low energy requirements because of that yeah as far as the you know the footprint you know if you have a two foot diameter extraction column your footprint is a little you know is about maybe around 4 foot overall uh all going up whereas you have a you know I don't know 10 mixer settlers you know they could take up quite a bit more uh you know space than than that small foot footprint that you're getting for a uh for an extraction colum and to add to that a bit like using Don's example there 10 mixer settlers those are 10 pieces of rotating equipment that you have to manage and and power as opposed to just a single one in an extraction home right thank you another question is um what is the maximum flow rate you can design an extraction system for I thought I kind of tried to point that out you know with with the shyal column the biggest one we built to date is 650 to 700 gallons a minute combined flow of both phases now we feel we can even build bigger than that to be honest with you that's just the biggest one we' built to date the car column is a little bit lower maybe a single car comp maybe around 400 450 maybe as much as 500 gallons a minute combined flow so if you need more you might have to put two of those in uh in parallel okay another question is how do you handle pH this is a a good question and you can of course see like the impact of bearing p as you looked at different extracting isotherms for solvent extraction processes the way we would handle it is by adjusting the pH of the aquous stream um entering an extraction column that's probably the first way we'd run with it and then also by monitoring the pH throughout the extraction column itself using pH probes and then adding additional aquous um alkaline or acid Inlet streams to the extraction column as appropriate and this is something else you know we really monitored during pilot testing by having pH probes within the column and then adding those acidic and basic streams as needed to really control that because pH control is certainly very critical for for these types of processes great thank you um we do have a bunch of other questions that came in towards the back end which we'll respond to after this meeting by email um definitely you know thank you everyone for attending this web we do have an email address at the bottom if you do want to reach out to us separately it's contact cod.com we definitely appreciate everyone joining and thank you very much take care thank you all thanks everyone