Over the last twenty years, corrosion and plugging have been considered the two most well known technical difficulties of the Supercritical Wet Oxidation Process (SCWO). It is mainly due to these difficulties that SCWO could not be applied yet to salt containing wastes in an industrial scale retaining its economical attractiveness. The contribution presented here addresses the consequent elaboration of more sophisticated apparatus design and process techniques, by which the
aforementioned problems could be alleviated at least partially or even be overcome. A coaxial hydrothermal burner with wall cooling was successfully tested in a high-pressure pilot plant using salt-containing artificial wastewater. This confirms earlier proposals that the main item of a future SCWO facility could be a reaction vessel containing crucial elements such as pilot flame, multiple waste water and oxidizer inlet, and transpiring-wall cooling. Based on this, an efficient and economically
attractive design of an industrial-scale SCWO reactor is presented in which the only parts that still may suffer from general corrosion are geometrically very simple and cheap and therefore an acceptable part of the operating costs. Keywords: Supercritical Wet Oxidation, hydrothermal flames, energy consumption, burner geometry