Abstract
Highly accurate, quantitative analyses of mixtures of hydrogen isotopologues—both the stable species, H2, D2, and HD, and the radioactive species, T2, HT, and DT—are of great importance in fields as diverse as deuterium–tritium fusion, neutrino mass measurements using tritium β-decay, or for photonuclear experiments in which hydrogen–deuterium targets are used. In this publication we describe a production, handling, and analysis facility capable of fabricating well-defined gas samples, which may contain any of the stable and radioactive hydrogen isotopologues, with sub-percent accuracy for the relative species concentrations. The production is based on precise manometric gas mixing of H2, D2, and T2. The heteronuclear isotopologues HD, HT, and DT are generated via controlled, in-line catalytic reaction or by β-induced self-equilibration, respectively. The analysis was carried out using an in-line intensity- and wavelength-calibrated Raman spectroscopy system. This allows for continuous monitoring of the composition of the circulating gas during the self-equilibration or catalytic evolution phases. During all procedures, effects, such as exchange reactions with wall materials, were considered with care. Together with measurement statistics, these and other systematic effects were included in the determination of composition uncertainties of the generated reference gas samples. Measurement and calibration accuracy at the level of 1% was achieved.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilQuantitative, compositional analysis of gas mixtures, which contain hydrogen (H2 ), is frequently required in the characterization and monitoring of, for example, combustion gases
The analysis principle to extract the calibration factors RXY has been introduced in Section 4.3, which is based on the procedure described in detail in Ref. [16]
The aim of the TRIHYDE project has been to set up a facility capable (i) of producing accurate gas mixtures containing tritiated molecules and (ii) of precisely characterizing such mixtures, using a range of mostly in-line gas analysis instrumentation but predominantly exploiting molecule-specific Raman spectroscopy
Summary
Quantitative, compositional analysis of gas mixtures, which contain hydrogen (H2 ), is frequently required in the characterization and monitoring of, for example, combustion gases. Much less common are mixtures that contain any of the other hydrogen isotopologues (D2 , T2 , HD, HT, and DT, in addition to H2 ). There are a number of research fields and practical applications requiring highly accurate analysis of such mixtures, those which contain tritium-substituted species. This need for tritium analysis and monitoring is encountered in the following three topical applications. Analysis of tritium purity and of operational mixture preparation is key in tritium production and processing installations, such as, for example, our own Tritium. Tritium/deuterium mixtures will be used as the fuel in future fusion reactors, such as ITER (the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) and DEMO
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