Numerical Simulation of Membrane Reactor for Detritiation of Plasma Exhaust Gas

Abstract

One of the design targets for the ITER Tokamak Exhaust Processing system is to suppress the loss of tritium to less than 10^-5 g/h into the Normal Vent Detritiation System of the Tritium Plant. The plasma exhaust gas, therefore, needs to be processed with an overall tritium removal efficiency of about 10⁸. Such a high decontamination factor can be achieved by multistage processes. The third step of the three step CAPER process developed at the TLK is based on a so-called permeator catalyst (PERMCAT) reactor, a direct combination of a Pd/Ag permeation membrane and a catalyst bed. In this work, a numerical simulation of the PERMCAT reactor was performed and the result was compared with experimental data.