For anyone encountering this thread: I'm having to abandon this approach. Data from porous crystalline silicon bombardment with heavy noble gas ions at recoil energies shows that while the gases do enter the pore space, sputtering steadily closes the pores and densifies the material. Larger...
The problem is that this is a theoretical study. Working with 232U directly is highly nontrivial and beyond the scope of the study. The aerogel structure is at least well modeled (with natural uranium) - but not radon diffusion within it (the generation rate would be too slow for practical...
More specifically, I can be confident at how quickly whatever gets into the pores diffuses out, but I cannot be confident at how quickly whatever is in the matrix leaves, because it's not simple bulk solid diffusion, but rather diffusion through a delicate fine structure that just got blasted by...
I'm working on a theoretical analysis of a thin 232U UO3 aerogel layer (5-20nm feature size, granular, crystalline, ~98% porosity) in a vacuum in GEANT4, with the desired goal of losing most of the 220Rn (and thus the hard gamma from 208Tl and the residual 208Pb mass). GEANT4 handles the...