| ▲ | Figs 6 hours ago | |||||||
Could you use a centrifuge to separate the elements instead of vaporizing it? | ||||||||
| ▲ | adrian_b 4 hours ago | parent [-] | |||||||
You cannot use a centrifuge to separate solid iron. Using a centrifuge with liquid iron would create a gradient of concentration of the heavier elements dissolved in it, but that would not be enough to separate them. All that could be done with a centrifuge with liquid iron would be to obtain an iron alloy enriched in heavy elements. However, I doubt that it would be possible to make a centrifuge for liquid iron that would have a lifetime sufficient to process quantities of the order of one million tons of iron. I do not think that until now anyone has ever tried to make a centrifuge that could work with a liquid metal at such a temperature. Most materials lose their strength at such temperatures, so the risk of breakage for the centrifuge would be extremely high, a risk that is increased by how heavy iron is. It is also not clear if such an enrichment of the heavy elements would bring a sufficient simplification to further processing steps to make it worthwhile. | ||||||||
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