Two-dimensional fluid simulation of plasma reactors for the immobilization of krypton Original Research Article

Direct current glow discharge plasma sources are being developed as reactors for immobilization of radioactive krypton gas recovered from the off-gas stream of a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant. In order to design these reactors, two-dimensional simulations have been performed using a fluid model coupled with Poissonʹs equation. Nonlinear governing equations were expressed by a fully implicit scheme and the equations were solved using the Newton–Krylov method. We investigated algorithm performance of two methods from the Krylov projection techniques, namely the Bi-CGSTAB method and the transpose-free quasi-minimal residual (TFQMR) method. The results showed that the Bi-CGSTAB method converged considerably faster than the TFQMR method. Direct current glow discharge plasmas in three types of krypton immobilization apparatus were simulated to study the differences in electrode geometry. Simulation results agreed qualitatively with measurements of electron density.