Equipment selection for atmospheric drying

Heavy water management is a major factor in deciding the economics of the PHWRs. Hence it is necessary to have an efficient recovery system, for the heavy water vapour escaping from various process systems and maintain a dry atmosphere in the recovery areas. While the basic objective of the atmospheric drying system is to maximize recovery and to minimize stack losses, it is equally important to optimally design the system with due consideration to operational and maintenance aspects. At present, heavy water vapour recovery in the existing Nuclear Power Plants (NPPs) is carried out by dryers of dual fixed bed design. While moving bed design could have some advantages, this has not been adopted so far because of the cumbersome mechanical design involved and special requirements for nuclear application. Developmental work done in this direction has resulted in compact alternative designs. In one of the designs, the change over from adsorption to regeneration is achieved by rotating the bed slowly. This concept is further refined in another alternative using a dessicant wheel. This paper contains brief equipment description of different designs; enumerates the design requirements of an atmospheric drying system for reactor building; describes steps for designing fixed bed type D2O vapour recovery system, and highlights advances in dryer technology. (author)