Mathematical models for water vapor absorption on catalyst and adsorbent in atmosphere detritiation and correlation of oxidation rate of hydrogen

Abstract Establishment of tritium recovery system is necessary to prevent its leakage to the working area. The catalytic oxidation and adsorption process is the most valid method to recover tritium into the working area of those facilities. Therefore, there is a necessity that the tritium recovery system with large-scale and higher integrity is developed and constructed. For this purpose, it is required to obtain and accumulate updated database for chemical engineering design based on most recently commercial and available catalysts and adsorbents. In this work, we selected an adsorbent and catalysts, and examined their adsorption characteristics for water vapor. Adsorption isotherms were studied with a volumetric gas adsorption instrument. Various adsorption models were tested to correlate the experimental isotherms. For the catalyst, catalytic activity for oxidation of hydrogen was investigated in wet gas conditions. The experimental isotherms were successfully correlated using multi-site Langmuir–Freundlich equations. The catalytic activity was found to be influenced by the amount of water vapor adsorbed on the catalyst substrate.