MicroSISAK: continuous liquid–liquid extractions of radionuclides at 0.2 mL/min

Abstract Continuous liquid–liquid extraction of short-lived radionuclides has traditionally been performed with the SISAK system consisting of static mixers and H-centrifuges for phase separation. SISAK operates at flow rates of typically 1 mL/s. Thus, it produces large volumes of radioactive liquid waste that is difficult to dispose of. Therefore, it has been aimed to develop and use a further miniaturised extraction unit based on microtechnology and precision engineering to reduce the flow rate by at least two orders of magnitude. The accordingly developed MicroSISAK device is a micro membrane extractor in which a micromixer element with 2 × 16 feed channels of 30 µm width followed by a 6…