Particle separations by electrophoretic techniques

A new method for particle separations based on capillary electrophoresis has been developed and characterized. It uniquely separates particles according to their chemical nature. Separations have been demonstrated with chemically modified latex particles and with inorganic oxide and silicate particles. Separations have been shown both experimentally and theoretically to be essentially independent of particle size in the range of about 0.2 {mu}m to 10 {mu}m. The method has been applied to separations of U0{sub 2} particles from environmental particulate material. For this, an integrated method was developed for capillary electrophoretic separation, collection of separated fractions, and determinations of U0{sub 2} and environmental particles in each fraction. Experimental runs with the integrated method on mixtures of UO{sub 2} particles and environmental particulate material demonstrated enrichment factors of 20 for UO{sub 2} particles in respect to environmental particles in the U0{sub 2}containing fractions. This enrichment factor reduces the costs and time for processing particulate samples by the lexan process by a factor of about 20.