Investigation of Isotope Effects in the Gas Streams Supplied by a 1:1 ITER Storage Bed Using a Micro Gas Chromatography

Abstract

In the present design of the Storage and Delivery System of the ITER Tritium Plant deuterium, tritium and their mixtures are stored in hydrogen storage beds with a storage capacity of 100 g. During plasma operation it is required that deuterium-tritium gases with well defined ratios of D/T are supplied by the different hydrogen storage beds. Due to the isotope effects the composition of the hydrogen gas mixture supplied by the getter bed may be different from the one absorbed in the getter and may even change during unloading of the bed depending on the variation of the isotope effect with the actual amount of hydrogen isotopes stored in the bed.At the Forschungszentrum Karlsruhe a 1:1 prototype of ITER hydrogen storage bed with a capacity of 100 g tritium and a target supply rate of up to 200 Pam3s-1 was designed and manufactured. The getter bed is currently filled with zirconium-cobalt and is installed in an experimental rig coupled with a micro gas chromatograph in order to perform texts under different operation conditions and to characterize the possible isotope effects. In this work a first data on the isotope effect during loading and unloading of the getter bed with the different hydrogen-deuterium mixtures is presented.