Abstract
By leveraging the large isotope effect in the palladium hydrogen isotope system, the Thermal Cycling Absorption Process (TCAP) provides an efficient and advantageous means to separate protium, deuterium, and tritium. To meet increased future tritium processing demands, such as those needed for fusion power plants, current designs of the separation columns need to be adapted and optimized using the progress made in understanding hydrogen isotope science. One key to this optimization lies in understanding the baseline performance for currently employed separation packing materials. Pd/k and molecular sieves, as commonly used for the separation of hydrogen isotopes, are herein evaluated to establish a baseline for their separation efficiency. Van Deemter plots are formulated, and the influence of each parameter is evaluated to determine areas for improvement.
Acknowledgments
The authors wish to acknowledge Elle Belliveau, Tommy Sessions, Luke Angelette, Héctor Colón-Mercado, Robert Rabun, Jim Klein, Jose Cortes-Concepcion, and Michael Martinez-Rodriguez for helpful discussions, direction, and programmatic support. The publisher acknowledges that the U.S. Government has a license to provide public access under the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Public Access Plan (http://energy.gov/downloads/doe-public-access-plan).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.