The influence of column temperature on the hydrogen isotopes separation performance of FDC

Frontal displacement chromatography (FDC) is a promising method for hydrogen isotopes separation with obvious advantages such as simple operation process, low tritium retention in system and easy to scale up, etc. We designed and constructed a FDC device using Pd-Al₂O₃ as separation material in previous study, and the feasibility of FDC for hydrogen isotopes separation was confirmed. On the basis of the results, a series of experiments at different column temperatures were carried out to investigate the temperature influence to the separation performance, with the composition of (5 ± 0.1)% H₂-(5 ± 0.1)% D₂-(90 ± 0.1)% Ar of feed gas. Experiments were carried out at the temperature of 303K, 273K, 263K, 253K, 213K, at the gas flow rate of 15 mL (NTP)/min. The results indicated that lower temperature, higher enrichment factor while the feed gas composition and the gas flow rate are definite; lower temperature, shorter 'separation transition state', and then better separation efficiency. The deuterium enrichment factor became 65 from l.5 while the temperature decreased to 273K from 303K. It also showed that the deuterium recovery ratio and the deuterium abundance of product gas increases with the temperature decrease except for the case of 303K. At the temperature of 273K and below, the deuterium recovery ratio were all higher than 42%, deuterium abundance of product were all larger than 98%, and the maximum of deuterium abundance at 213K was 99.8%. (authors)