A simultaneous isotope separation enhancement: Integration of the D isotope enrichment process and the O18 isotope enrichment process

Abstract

Nowadays, the two isotope enrichment processes that employ water as the raw material are the ones for O18 isotope enrichment and D isotope enrichment, both of which disregard the interactions between their processes and fail to account for the full potential of D isotope. Therefore, an integration process is established in this paper. To achieve the full utilization of the D isotope in this process, an improved H2O-H2S dual-temperature isotope exchange system (IGS) is developed as the mass exchanger to transfer the D isotope obtained from the normalization of the heavy oxygen water distillation product in the hot section to the cold section. Through the simultaneous enhancement strategy, the IGS process requires 0.284531 mol/hr of feed to produce 0.2018 mol/hr of D isotope while about 30,266 times of feed is required for conventional GS process under the same process condition. Consequently, the D isotope enrichment process can be changed from factory scale to lab scale. The heavy water and heavy oxygen water products can be produced by the cold and hot sections of the IGS process, respectively, making the recovery ratio of 99.98% and the wastewater ratio of 0%.