Study of transversal dimension influence on species separation in thermogravitational diffusion columns (Q2466158)

The authors have considered three dimensional thermogravitational diffusion columns to study the influence of transversal dimension on the separation of different species in a binary fluid mixture. The binary mixture is considered to be Newtonian and follows the Boussinesq approximation. The flow is modeled in terms of the macroscopic balance of mass, momentum, energy and species concentration. The expressions for heat and mass fluxes are based on non-equilibrium thermodynamics where the cross effect of thermo-diffusion is considered while the Soret effect is neglected. An analytical solution is obtained for a stratified fluid mixture where the vertical component of the fluid velocity is assumed to be \(x\)-dependent and the temperature distribution corresponds to that of the conductive regime. The analytical velocity profile agrees well with the experimental data with some discrepancies observed for the transversal width at \(b=5\)mm. With so many simplifications introduced in the three-dimensional solution, it is difficult to assess the merit of the present study over the two-dimensional previous results.