Preliminary Experiments on Continuous Separation of H2/He Mixture Gas

An experiment on H2/He separation by using the new method named Continuous Circulation Chromatograph method (C3 method) has been performed for use in a fuel cycle of the fusion reactor. In this experiment, a molecularsieve was selected for the adsorbent material. In addition, the H2/He mixture and Ar were used as the inlet sample gas and the carrier gas, respectively. It was confirmed that the inlet H2/He sample gases with various composition ratios were continuously separated to each gas component at a room temperature and below the atmospheric pressure, within a detectable limit of the quadrupole mass spectrometer we used. This separation method can simplify the fusion fuel cycle, where the He and other impurities are directly removed from the plasma exhaust gas within a vacuum pumping system.