• Progress in Superconductivity and Cryogenics
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• v.25 no.3
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• pp.13-17
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• 2023

Magnetic separation technology for small paramagnetic particles has been desired for the volume reduction of contaminated soil from the Fukushima nuclear power plant accident and for the separation of scale and crud from nuclear power plants. However, the magnetic separation for paramagnetic particles requires a superconducting high gradient magnetic separation system applied, hence expanding the bore diameter of the magnets is necessary for mass processing and the initial and running costs would be enormous. The use of high magnetic fields makes safe onsite operation difficult, and there is an industrial need to increase the magnetic separation efficiency for paramagnetic particles in as low a magnetic field as possible. Therefore, we have been developing a magnetic separation system combined with a selection tube, which can separate small paramagnetic particles in a low magnetic field. In the previous technique we developed, a certain range of particle size was classified, and the classified particles were captured by magnetic separation. In this new approach, the fluid control method has been improved in order to the selectively classify particles of various diameters by using a multi-stage selection tube. The soil classification using a multi-stage selection tube was studied by calculation and experiment, and good results were obtained. In this paper, we report the effectiveness of the multi-stage selection tube was examined.