Design and Fabrication of Photochemical Reactor for Scaling up Operation of Laser Isotope Separation Process

atural carbon consists of two stable isotopes, viz. C-13 (1.11%) and C-12 (98.89%). Carbon-13 is an important isotope as a tracer in chemistry, life sciences, medicine and biochemical synthesis. Although the current world production of C-13 at 90% concentration is about 10 kg per annum, an optimistic projection of hundred fold increase in the market demand is anticipated in view of rapid development of routine medical applications such as breath tests and whole body NMR. As a spin-off, C-13 depleted carbon (C-12 content 99.9%) can be used to make ‘super diamond’. The current method of C-13 separation by very low temperature ( -205C ) distillation of carbon monoxide has inherent drawbacks such as huge distillation tower, low separation factor, high energy consumption thus leading to a high production cost. In view of the growing demand for carbon isotopes, we are actively engaged in developing laser photochemical methods.