On order reduction in hydrogen isotope distillation models

Hydrogen isotope distillation is one of the most essential processes to be used in the fuel processing plant of magnetic fusion reactors. The requirements for purity of the products of the distillation cascade are also very high. Accurate prediction of the transient and steady state behavior of this system is very important for the assessment of the tritium inventory dynamics in the fusion plant. This paper presents a methodology for the development of reduced order models of hydrogen isotope distillation that show very good agreement with experimental data, while reducing the required computation time by approximately one or two orders of magnitude when compared with full-scale, rigorous models. This can be a very important computational tool, especially for the incorporation of hydrogen isotope distillation models in dynamic simulation codes of the overall fuel system.