On species separation in $n$-component mixture under microgravity

Abstract

Recently, we proved that it was possible to significantly increase the importance of the species separation for binary mixtures, under microgravity, using forced convection obtained by a uniform translational displacement of the horizontal isothermal walls of the cell maintained at $T_{h}$ and $T_{c}$ respectively, with $\Delta T = T_{h} -T_{c}$.The present work is an extension of the study performed by Mojtabi (2020) with various mixtures, from binary to $n$-component mixtures. An application with a ternary mixture was presented. The mixture of tetralin, isobutyl benzene, $n$-dodecane with respectively 0.8–0.1–0.1 mass fractions was studied experimentally in weightlessness.

Keywords

• Thermo-diffusion
• Species separation
• Soret effect
• Microgravity
• Forced convection
• Multicomponent mixtures