Hydrogen adsorption performance for large-scale cryogenic molecular sieve bed

• Published in: Fusion engineering and design 2019-09, Vol.146, p.1863-1867
• Main Authors: Park, Soon Chang, Son, Seok-Kwon, Ahn, Mu-Young, Ying, Alice, Cho, Seungyon, Park, Yi-Hyun, Lee, Youngmin
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Adsorption; Cryogenic adsorption; Cryogenic molecular sieve bed (CMSB); Experiments; Flow velocity; Hydrogen; Hydrogen isotopes; Molecular sieve 5A; Molecular sieves; Performance evaluation; Performance prediction; Tritium
• ISSN: 0920-3796; 1873-7196
• DOI: 10.1016/j.fusengdes.2019.03.052

•Large-scale hydrogen adsorption experiments were conducted using Cryogenic Molecular Sieve Bed module of PGLoop facility.•The experimental parameters were chosen considering blanket conditions.•The size effect was not large, and the experimental results agree reasonably well with existing small-scale data.•The diffusion of hydrogen gas in the purge gas is the dominating factor in CMSB design. Cryogenic hydrogen adsorption using molecular sieve beds is considered to be one of the main candidate processes for recovery of produced tritium from purge gas in breeding blankets and it has been chosen for separating hydrogen isotopes in Tritium Extraction System (TES) of Korean Helium Cooled Ceramic Reflector (HCCR) Test Blanket System (TBS). Various adsorbents and their performance have been studied for the cryogenic adsorption using small-scale experiments. However, large-scale experiments comparable to TBS-relevant scale are required to have sufficient confidence for component design and performance prediction of Cryogenic Molecular Sieve Bed (CMSB) for the TBS and beyond. To properly evaluate hydrogen adsorption performance of a large size CMSB, a series of experiments have been performed using PGLoop facility which is constructed and operated in the National Fusion Research Institute. The experimental conditions were set to include breeding-blankets-relevant parameters. As such, the effects of swamping ratio, total pressure, and flow rates on the performances of CMSB were studied in the range of hydrogen partial pressures from 100 to 700 Pa. While a slight reduction in hydrogen adsorption performance is observed in comparison to the small isotherm experiments, which can be attributed to scale-up effects, it shows that the experimental results agree reasonably well with existing literature data.