Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Masoud Khajenoori ¹
• S. Yousefi-Nasab ²
• J. Safdari ²
• Saba Basiri ³

¹ University of Kashan- Faculty of Engineering - Department of Chemical Engineering

² Nuclear Fuel Cycle Research School, Nuclear Science and Technology Research Institute, AEOI, P.O.Box: 11365-8486, Tehran - Iran

³ Isfahan University of Technology

Abstract

It is important to maintain the vacuum in the space between the rotor and the body of a gas centrifuge machine during the gasification and enrichment process. For this reason, the molecular pump is connected on the upper part of the body, which has grooves that when moving particles collide with it, according to the direction of the grooves, they are deflected so that they return to the rotor again. One of the methods of analyzing the gas flow inside the molecular pump is solving the flow equations with the method of Sickafus and his colleagues, which is very useful due to the reduction of calculation time. In this article, four meta-heuristic algorithms have been used to achieve optimal geometric and operational parameters of the molecular pump. The results show that among the meta-heuristic algorithms, the optimization with the humpback whale algorithm (WOA) creates the highest compression ratio for the molecular pump. The average absolute deviation value of the logarithm of the pressure density ratio with the values predicted by the upgraded Sickafus method with optimal parameters shows a very good agreement between the experimental method and the upgraded Sickafus method with the meta-heuristic WOA algorithm.

Keywords

• Meta-heuristic algorithm
• Molecular pump
• Sickafus method
• Compression ratio

Main Subjects

• NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS