The design and development of hydrogen isotope extraction technologies for a limit-style liquid lithium loop
type: CreativeWork
description: As lithium has grown in popularity as a plasma-facing material, efforts have been placed on examining its viability as a first wall candidate. Lithium has proven over numerous studies to improve core confinement, while allowing access to operational regimes previously unattainable while using solid, high-Z divertor and limiter modules. These benefits are due to the fuel retention capabilities of lithium, which allow it to be an almost ideally absorbing boundary, which is both beneficial and problematic. While lithium exhibits a number of other advantages and disadvantages as a plasma-facing material, none is more important than the tritium retention problem. As such, extraction technologies must be constructed and verified within the scope of larger scale lithium loop systems that separate lithium impurities, recover deuterium and tritium, and recycle clean liquid lithium back to the plasma-material interface. Laboratory-scale and pilot-scale studies have been conducted at the Center for Plasma-Material Interactions at the University of Illinois to investigate a number of phenomena that influence the recovery of entrained tritium from lithium. While the ultimate goal is to develop a fully-functional liquid lithium loop for the Lithium Metal Infused Trenches plasma-facing component, complete with efficient hydrogen reclamation technologies, there exists a lack in understanding within the community of the thermochemical fundamentals that are envisioned to drive tritium reclamation. Of specific interest are the evolution fluxes of hydrogen isotopes from solutions of various concentrations of hydrogen in lithium, and the associated temperatures. The knowledge of how the isotopic fraction affects recovery is pivotal to determining the appropriate thermal treatment technique. The laboratory-scale experiments in this report aimed at filling in the knowledge gaps in the literature with regards to the thermochemistry of the hydrogen-lithium system. In all cases, hydrogen was…
abstract: As lithium has grown in popularity as a plasma-facing material, efforts have been placed on examining its viability as a first wall candidate. Lithium has proven over numerous studies to improve core confinement, while allowing access to operational regimes previously unattainable while using solid, high-Z divertor and limiter modules. These benefits are due to the fuel retention capabilities of lithium, which allow it to be an almost ideally absorbing boundary, which is both beneficial and problematic. While lithium exhibits a number of other advantages and disadvantages as a plasma-facing material, none is more important than the tritium retention problem. As such, extraction technologies must be constructed and verified within the scope of larger scale lithium loop systems that separate lithium impurities, recover deuterium and tritium, and recycle clean liquid lithium back to the plasma-material interface. Laboratory-scale and pilot-scale studies have been conducted at the Center for Plasma-Material Interactions at the University of Illinois to investigate a number of phenomena that influence the recovery of entrained tritium from lithium. While the ultimate goal is to develop a fully-functional liquid lithium loop for the Lithium Metal Infused Trenches plasma-facing component, complete with efficient hydrogen reclamation technologies, there exists a lack in understanding within the community of the thermochemical fundamentals that are envisioned to drive tritium reclamation. Of specific interest are the evolution fluxes of hydrogen isotopes from solutions of various concentrations of hydrogen in lithium, and the associated temperatures. The knowledge of how the isotopic fraction affects recovery is pivotal to determining the appropriate thermal treatment technique. The laboratory-scale experiments in this report aimed at filling in the knowledge gaps in the literature with regards to the thermochemistry of the hydrogen-lithium system. In all cases, hydrogen was…
author: Christenson, Michael Peter
language: en
keywords: Retention, Recovery, Recycling, Thermoelectic Magnetohydrodynamics, Dissolution, Precipitation, Plasma, Lithium, Hydrogen, Deuterium, Tritium, Flux, Exposure
date published: 2018-09-04T20:26:37Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:38Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/100902