Regensburg 2025 – wissenschaftliches Programm

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O: Fachverband Oberflächenphysik

O 77: Poster Vacuum Science Technology: Theory and Applications

O 77.3: Poster

Mittwoch, 19. März 2025, 18:00–20:00, P2

Tritium Induced Exchange Reaction of Hydrogen Isotopes — •James O'Callaghan, Robin Größle, Simon Niemes, and Robin Holzwarth — Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe (TLK), Institute of Astroparticle Physics (IAP), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), Karlsruhe, Germany

Tritium (T), the heaviest isotope of hydrogen, is used for experiments in astro-particle physics and is essential as fuel for fusion reactors. It comes with many challenges due to its radioactivity. Isotopic exchange is one such challenge, Hydrogen-1 (H) and Deuterium (D) can be left in an idealised vessel and will practically not react with each other; the concentrations of H2, D2 and HD will remain unchanged and will not reach the thermal equilibrium in practical time scales. This is not the case with tritium. In the presence of tritium, the radioactive decay induces chemical reactions and therefore the concentrations will shift towards the chemical equilibrium. Most prominently in a fusion reactor context, starting with mixtures of homonuclear molecules (H2, D2, T2), the production of potentially undesirable heteronuclear molecules (HD, HT and DT) up to the chemical equilibrium is facilitated by the decay of tritium. This needs to be understood for designing fuel cycle components for a fusion reactor. In this contribution first efforts for a data driven development of an empirical model to describe the reactions rates in tritiated mixtures is given.

Keywords: Tritium; Fusion; Astro-Particle; Radiolysis; Isotope exchange