Off-Gas Adsorption Model Capabilities and Recommendations

Technical Report · Tue Mar 01 00:00:00 EST 2016

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1260462· OSTI ID:1260462

Lyon, Kevin L. ^[1]; Welty, Amy K. ^[1]; Law, Jack ^[1]; Ladshaw, Austin ^[2]; Yiacoumi, Sotira ^[2]; Tsouris, Costas ^[3]

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1. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
2. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States)
3. Oak Ridge National Lab. (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)

Off-gas treatment is required to reduce emissions from aqueous fuel reprocessing. Evaluating the products of innovative gas adsorption research requires increased computational simulation capability to more effectively transition from fundamental research to operational design. Early modeling efforts produced the Off-Gas SeParation and REcoverY (OSPREY) model that, while efficient in terms of computation time, was of limited value for complex systems. However, the computational and programming lessons learned in development of the initial model were used to develop Discontinuous Galerkin OSPREY (DGOSPREY), a more effective model. Initial comparisons between OSPREY and DGOSPREY show that, while OSPREY does reasonably well to capture the initial breakthrough time, it displays far too much numerical dispersion to accurately capture the real shape of the breakthrough curves. DGOSPREY is a much better tool as it utilizes a more stable set of numerical methods. In addition, DGOSPREY has shown the capability to capture complex, multispecies adsorption behavior, while OSPREY currently only works for a single adsorbing species. This capability makes DGOSPREY ultimately a more practical tool for real world simulations involving many different gas species. While DGOSPREY has initially performed very well, there is still need for improvement. The current state of DGOSPREY does not include any micro-scale adsorption kinetics and therefore assumes instantaneous adsorption. This is a major source of error in predicting water vapor breakthrough because the kinetics of that adsorption mechanism is particularly slow. However, this deficiency can be remedied by building kinetic kernels into DGOSPREY. Another source of error in DGOSPREY stems from data gaps in single species, such as Kr and Xe, isotherms. Since isotherm data for each gas is currently available at a single temperature, the model is unable to predict adsorption at temperatures outside of the set of data currently available. Thus, in order to improve the predictive capabilities of the model, there is a need for more single-species adsorption isotherms at different temperatures, in addition to extending the model to include adsorption kinetics. This report provides background information about the modeling process and a path forward for further model improvement in terms of accuracy and user interface.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1260462
• Report Number(s): INL/EXT-16-37975; TRN: US1601557
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

11 NUCLEAR FUEL CYCLE AND FUEL MATERIALS
ADSORPTION
ADSORPTION ISOTHERMS
DIAGRAMS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
WATER VAPOR
KINETICS
COMPARATIVE EVALUATIONS
ERRORS
RECOMMENDATIONS
REPROCESSING
CALCULATION METHODS
ACCURACY
DESIGN
PROGRAMMING
D CODES
GASEOUS WASTES
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
O CODES
krypton
MOOSE
off-gas capture
OSPREY
physical adsorption modelling
xenon
DGOSPREY