An Automatic Approach to the Stabilization Condition in a HIx Distillation Simulation

In the Sulfur-Iodine(SI) thermochemical process to produce nuclear hydrogen, an H2O-HI-I2 ternary mixture solution discharged from the Bunsen reaction is primarily concentrated by electro-electrodialysis. The concentrated solution is distillated in the HIx distillation column to generate a high purity HI vapor. The pure HI vapor is obtained at the top of the HIx distillation column and the diluted HIx solution is discharged at the bottom of the column. In order to simulate the steady-state HIx distillation column, a vapor-liquid equilibrium (VLE) model of the H2O-HI-I2 ternary system is required and the subprogram to calculate VLE concentrations has been already introduced by KAERI research group in 2006. The steady state simulation code for the HIx distillation process was also developed in 2007. However, the intrinsic phenomena of the VLE data such as the steep slope of a T-x-y diagram caused the instability of the simulation calculation. In this paper, a computer program to automatically find a stabilization condition in the steady state simulation of the HIx distillation column is introduced. A graphic user interface (GUI) function to monitor an approach to the stabilization condition was added in this program