Simulation study of water effect for the two phase separation in Bunsen section of SI thermochemical cycle to produce hydrogen utilizing nuclear heat

Among the Thermochemical Cycles, a well established sulfur-iodine (SI) process developed at General Atomics (GA) and first described in the mid 1970's has been considered for hydrogen production using high temperature heat from a nuclear reactor in the France, Japan, Korea, China and US. The SI process consists of three chemical processes, which sum to the dissociation of water. These processes are as follows: Bunsen reaction (Section I) : I2(l)+SO2(g)+2H2O(l)→2HI(aq)+H2SO4(aq)(∼120 .deg. C) Sulfuric acid decomposition.(Section II): H2SO4(aq)→H2O+SO2(g)+.O2(g) (∼850 .deg. C) Hydridic acid decomposition (Section III): 2HI(g)→H2(g)+I2(g) (∼450 .deg. C min.) Net reaction: H2O→H2+1/2O2 For Section I (Bunsen Process), GA modified the earlier flowsheet, since the previous thermodynamic model was insufficient to perform a strictly thermodynamic model. This restricted their ability to fully optimize the flowsheet. The earlier flowsheet for Section I was modified by changing the flow rates to match the modified versions of Sections II and III. As explained in section 2, there are several issues with Bunsen reaction and hence improvements are being considered. Here in this work the effect of water are studied for Bunsen