Theoretical evaluation of the tritium extraction from liquid metal flows through a free surface and through a permeable membrane

Effective tritium extraction from PbLi flows is a requirement for the functioning of any PbLi based breeding blanket concept. For a continuous plant operation, the removal of the tritium dissolved in the PbLi has to be performed in line and sufficiently fast. Otherwise, tritium inventories in the liquid metal, start-up inventories and buffer inventories would be excessive from the safety point of view. Moreover, a slow response of the tritium extraction systems could also compromise the tritium self-sufficiency of the plant. A promising solution to this problem is to use highly permeable membranes in contact with the PbLi flow to promote the extraction via permeation. This technique is usually known as Permeation Against Vacuum (PAV). As an alternative, tritium could be extracted directly by permeation through a fluid free surface (FS) in contact with vacuum. In both configurations, the dynamics of tritium transport is ruled by a combination of convection, diffusion and surface recombination. In this paper, the tritium extraction processes in the FS and PAV configurations are studied in detail. For the first time, general analytical expressions for the extraction efficiency are derived for both techniques in a Cartesian geometry. These expressions are general in the sense that they do not impose any kind of assumption concerning the permeation regime of the membrane or the fluid boundary layer. The derived expressions have been used to analyze numerically the response of both configurations in a close loop system, such as the one of DEMO. The presented methodology allows comparing the FS and PAV configurations, assessing in which conditions one will be behave better than other.