Relative importance of process parameters and their mutual interactions on the hydrodynamics of a pulsed disc and doughnut column

The pulsed disc and doughnut extraction column (PDDC) has emerged as an efficient equipment in the field of hydrometallurgy. This work is concerned with determining the statistically significant process parameters and their mutual interaction in relation to the hydrodynamics of a PDDC. Pulsation intensity, %duty cycle, total throughput and organic to aqueous ratio are selected as the process variables. By the Analysis of Variance and the Student’s t test, Pulsation intensity has been identified as the most important parameter in the dispersion regime. %Duty cycle turns out to be a statistically significant process parameter. The mutual interaction between total throughput with pulsation intensity is found to be most influential on the dispersed phase holdup in the dispersion regime. It has been found that the dispersed holdup data is normally distributed. Based on the data, a linear regression model was fitted for the dispersion with an adjusted R2 of 0.983.