Development of numerical simulation code of membrane reactor for detritiation

The plasma exhaust gas from a fusion machine needs to be processed with very high tritium removal efficiency. Such a high decontamination factor is achieved by multistage processes. The last stage of the three-step CAPER process developed at the Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK) is based on a so-called permeator catalyst (PERMCAT) reactor. The PERMCAT principle is based on isotopic swamping in a counter current mode. To support experiments, dynamic process simulation is indispensable for process design, analysis, and operation. A first numerical calculation code has been developed for the process simulation of PERMCAT. The numerical model developed was based on counter current one-dimensional plug flows partitioned with a membrane. In this study, the axial dispersion was newly taken into consideration to the numerical simulation code and its effect was examined. Improvement of the numerical simulation code considering a 2-dimensional model was developed and test calculations were carried out.