Preliminary Experiments on Continuous Separation of H₂/He Mixture Gas

Abstract

An experiment on H₂/He separation by using the new method named Continuous Circulation Chromatograph method (C³ method) has been performed for use in a fuel cycle of the fusion reactor. In this experiment, a molecularsieve was selected for the adsorbent material. In addition, the H₂/He mixture and Ar were used as the inlet sample gas and the carrier gas, respectively. It was confirmed that the inlet H₂/He sample gases with various composition ratios were continuously separated to each gas component at a room temperature and below the atmospheric pressure, within a detectable limit of the quadrupole mass spectrometer we used. This separation method can simplify the fusion fuel cycle, where the He and other impurities are directly removed from the plasma exhaust gas within a vacuum pumping system.