Hydrogen adsorption performance for large-scale cryogenic molecular sieve bed

Abstract

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.