Development of high performance catalyst for off-gas treatment system in BWR

A high performance catalyst for off-gas treatment system in boiling water reactor (BWR) has been developed. The hydrogen concentration in the outlets of off-gas recombiners increased at several BWR plants in Japan. These phenomena were caused by deactivation of catalysts for the recombiners, and we assumed two types of deactivation mechanisms. The first cause was an increase of the amount of boehmite in the catalyst support due to alternation of the manufacturing process. The other cause was catalysts being poisoned by cyclic siloxanes that were introduced from the silicone sealant used in the upstream of the off-gas recombiners. The catalysts were manufactured by Pt adhering on alumina support. The conventional catalyst (CAT-A) used the aqueous solution of the chloroplatinic acid for adhesion of Pt. A dechlorination process by autoclave was applied to prevent the equipment at the downstream of the recombiners from stress corrosion cracking, but this process caused the support material to transform into boehmite. The boehmite-rich catalysts were deactivated more easily by organic silicon than gamma alumina-rich catalysts. Therefore, the CAT-A was replaced at many Japanese BWR plants by the improved catalyst (CAT-B), and their support was transformed into more stable gamma alumina by heating at 500degC. However, the siloxanes keep being detected in the off-gas though the source of siloxane had been removed and there still remain possibilities to deactivate the catalysts. Therefore, we have been developing high performance catalyst (CAT-C) that has higher activity and durability against poisoning. We investigated the properties of CAT-C by performance tests and instrumental analyses. The dependency of thermal output of nuclear reactor, and durability against siloxane poisoning were investigated. We found that CAT-C showed higher performance and better properties than CAT-B did. Moreover, we have been developing a modeling method to evaluate the hydrogen recombination reaction and deactivation by siloxanes. A simple Arrhenius equation was applied for the model and the poisoning behavior was represented using several parameters determined by experiments. We reproduced the experimental poisoning behavior as the outlet hydrogen concentration with the developed model. (author)