Centrifugal Separation of Titanium Isotopes Using Titanium Tetrachloride as Processing Gas

Stable isotope techniques have been widely used in modern agriculture, ecological environment, medical diagnosis, nuclear industry, fundamental physics research, and so on. Natural titanium has 5 stable isotopes. ⁴⁸Ti, ⁵⁰Ti and depleted ⁴⁶Ti isotopes respectively have important applications in nutritional studies, fundamental physics research and radioactive therapy. Study on centrifugal separation of titanium isotopes was carried out based on domestic centrifuges, with titanium tetrachloride as processing gas. Single-centrifuge experiments were done. As a result, the single-centrifuge working parameters for titanium tetrachloride were obtained where the basic overall separation factor of it reached 1.08. In addition, numerical calculation of centrifugal cascades for titanium isotopes was performed based on the results above. The design parameters of centrifugal cascades for titanium isotopes production were worked out. The study lays a foundation for titanium isotopes production by gas centrifugation method.