Influencing mechanism of carbon monoxide on the hydrogen absorption performance of Zr2Fe

Abstract

Zr2Fe is considered as the promising hydrogen isotopes trapping material to control the quantity of tritium generated in deuterium–tritium fusion reaction. However, the vulnerability to poisoning by impurity gases such as carbon monoxide is the bottleneck for their applications. In this study, we show from our DFT calculations that the Zr2Fe(101) surface is saturated with 13CO molecules and the hollow site is the most stable CO adsorption site. The adsorption energy of CO is much lower than that of hydrogen, resulting in the preferential adsorption of CO on Zr2Fe(101). The dependence of the Gibbs free energies of CO on the temperatures under UHV conditions were also obtained. The climbing-image nudged elastic band results reveal that CO pre-coverage would block the hydrogen adsorption sites and affect the hydrogen diffusion. The Sieverts analysis demonstrates that even the low concentration CO is a fatal poison to the hydrogenation process of Zr2Fe at ambient temperature. Hydrogen absorption may occur at a higher temperature with a lower absorption rate and capacity, as CO starts to desorpt from Zr2Fe(101) with the increase of temperature and thus making H2 absorption possible, even though the H diffusion energy barriers are relatively high. Our results provide the basis for exploring the influence mechanisms of the impurity gas CO on the hydrogen adsorption properties of the Zr-based alloys, which would be beneficial for the applications of metal getter of tritium-containing waste gas.