Recovery of deuterium from H–D gas mixture by thermal diffusion in a multi-concentric-tube column device of fixed total sum of column heights with transverse sampling streams

The effect of the increment in the number of concentric-tube thermal diffusion columns on the recovery of deuterium from H2–HD–D2 system with fixed total sum of column heights, has been investigated. The equations for predicting the degrees of separation in single-column, double-column and triple-column devices have been derived. Considerable improvement in recovery can be achieved if a multi-column device with larger number of column is employed, instead of a single-column device with column height equal to the same total sum of column heights, especially for the case of higher flow-rate operation and larger total sum of column heights.