Solution of the pancake model for flow in a gas centrifuge by means of a temperature potential Original Research Article

Gas centrifuges were originally developed for the purpose of enriching uranium in the fissionable isotope U235 to provide fuel for nuclear power reactors. Today, a major application is the enrichment of stable isotopes for a variety of purposes for research in physics, materials and medicine. The re-design of the centrifuges for the new purposes makes good use of computational experiments based on models of the internal flows. In this paper, a different formulation of Onsagerʹs pancake model is shown to result in a new sixth-order partial differential equation. This equation is solved by eigenfunction expansion and finite element method, and the predictions of the flow field based on solution by these methods is compared with the eigenfunction solution of Onsagerʹs original sixth-order equation. This new formulation provides the foundation for expanding this theory to three dimensional (non-axisymmetric) flows.