TRIEX facility: An experimental loop to test tritium extraction systems from lead lithium

The first and main step of the HCLL (helium cooled lithium lead) blanket fuel cycle consists of tritium extraction from the liquid breeder. In DEMO reactor a dedicated system, called TES (tritium extraction system), will be devoted to accomplish this task. ent technologies, belonging to the families of gas–liquid contactors, getters and tritium permeators have been studied in the last years, some of them mainly theoretically, others with much more experimental effort. quid contactors, which have been more experimentally studied, showed contradictory results. Plate, spray and bubble columns resulted in a very low-extraction efficiency. On the contrary, packed columns gave better results, although some doubts arise about the accuracy of the experiments performed in the past. r, packed columns seem to be the most attractive technology and for this reason was decided for a further optimisation and testing of their performances. In order to accomplish this task, a dedicated facility called TRIEX (tritium extraction) was designed and built and is now available in ENEA-Brasimone. In TRIEX the extraction efficiency of different packed columns will be tested in a systematic way paying particular attention to the hydrogen monitoring system in gas and liquid metal phase. The design and the main instrumentation of TRIEX facility, as well as the operating modes and the planned experimental campaign are presented in this paper.