Design and demonstration of a laboratory-scale oxygen controlled liquid sodium facility

Abstract

The control and detection of dissolved oxygen in liquid sodium is important for the mitigation of impurity driven corrosion in containment components used in sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR) environments. Oxygen purification systems are also necessary in smaller institutions to facilitate benchtop-scale testing of future SFR instrumentation. With interest in increasing laboratory-scale SFR research, this paper focuses on the design and demonstration of a safe and cost-effective purification loop using a cold trap (CT) and a plugging meter (PM) to control and measure oxygen levels. The demonstration of the purification system’s effectiveness to manipulate oxygen concentration was made through a series of validation experiments at several CT set-points in the range of 8–28[wppm]. Agreement below 14[wppm] with a relative error less than 1.8% was observed. These results indicate that an accessible oxygen controlled sodium system can be safely designed and operated at relatively low capital investment.