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School of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Ph.D. Thesis Defense Announcement
Complex Adsorption Modeling for Nuclear Energy Applications
By
Austin P. Ladshaw
Advisors:
Dr. Sotira Yiacoumi (CEE)
Committee Members:
Dr. Costas Tsouris (CEE, ORNL), Dr. Spyros G. Pavlostathis (CEE),
Dr. James Mulholland (CEE), Dr. David Sherrill (CHEM)
Date & Time: Monday, April 3rd, 2017 at 11:00 AM
Location: Sustainable Education Building Conference Room 122
ABSTRACT
Adsorption is a complex physical-chemical phenomenon by which molecules are
attached to surfaces of solid particles. The type of adsorption that occurs may often
depend on the media the phenomenon is occurring in, making the design of models for
various adsorption systems an arduous task. Regardless of the media, however, the basic
mechanisms of the adsorption process are the same. Therefore, a plausible approach to
the development of adsorption models in different systems would be to design a
generalized mathematical framework with all the necessary methods built in that will be
used as a platform to develop system specific adsorption models. In this work, the
investigation and development of such a structure will be discussed and a host of system
specific adsorption models that have been developed on top of that framework will be
detailed. The applications of interest are all related to nuclear energy and specifically the
availability of uranium in the Nuclear Fuel Cycle via recycling spent uranium fuel rods
and capturing new raw uranium from seawater. In recycling spent uranium, the
reprocessing procedure produces numerous gas pollutants that must be removed from the
off-gases before emission to the atmosphere. To facilitate the design of that capture
system, adsorption models have been developed to predict isothermal equilibria of
complex gas mixtures and to quantify the rates of adsorption for various adsorbent
materials. For recovering uranium from seawater, two different models were produced:
(i) a predictive, multi-ligand adsorption model to incorporate effects of pH, ionic
strength, and competing metals and (ii) an analytical model to quantify the impact of
current velocity on the mass transfer limitations of braided fiber adsorbents. The
culmination of these adsorption models will provide tools for scientists and engineers to
better understand adsorption phenomena in the applications of interest and subsequently
design the necessary capture systems at both the front and back ends of the Nuclear Fuel
Cycle.
