CALCULATIONAL METHODS FOR DETERMINING THE DISTRIBUTION OF COMPONENTS IN A SEPARATION CASCADE FOR MULTICOMPONENT MIXTURE

The distribution of the mixture components in a cascade plays an impor tant role in analyzing the performance of multicomponent isotope separ ation cascades. Two methods are proposed in this paper to calculate th e distribution. The ''iteration approach,'' in which a set of nonlinea r steady-state equations are iteratively solved at each stage, has the advantage of high speed with high precision, but may not converge for complicated cascade structures. The ''transient approach,'' which sim ulates the transient variations of the concentration distributions, is a generalized method which can be applied to any separation method, n umber of components, cascade structure, or number of feeds or products . The transient approach can not only determine the steady-state distr ibution, but can also examine the transient behavior. Some examples co mparing the results of the two methods are given in the paper.