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Several valuable isotopes used in medicine, industry, and science cannot be separated by a gas centrifuge with a driven mechanical rotor due to the lack of a suitable working gas that has a sufficiently high vapor pressure at room temperature. Such isotopes are typically produced by more costly separation processes. An advanced plasma centrifuge (PC) has been proposed that can separate specific isotopes at a lower cost. The PC achieves increased separation performance by the excitation of an axial counterflow in the plasma medium. In this work, we consider the non-isothermal Bödewadt problem for the PC with thermally driven axial circulation created by cooling one end of the PC's separation chamber. Due to the imbalance between the centrifugal force and the radial pressure gradient, we show that a secondary flow appears, which is imposed on the medium's rotation motion. The effect is analogous to the classical Bödewadt problem, where a rotational flow decelerates over a fixed surface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new plasma centrifuge (PC) for isotope separation has been proposed. The physical and mathematical models of the processes taking place in the PC are presented. A partially ionized medium rotates by a high-frequency (HF) electromagnetic field. Simultaneously, axial circulation is excited by a traveling magnetic field(TMF) to provide an increase of the separation performance in an axial direction. By assuming that the plasma medium is weakly ionized, diffusion separation can be assumed to undergo processes that are similar to those in a neutral gas. Charged particles in the medium move due to an applied rotating HF field, transferring force action to the neutral gas. By including a heated chamber wall, the PC is capable of separating low-boiling substances, including the isotopes of alkaline and alkaline-earth elements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]