Rapid Hydrogen Gas Generation Using Reactive Thermal Decomposition of Uranium Hydride

摘要

Oxygen gas injection has been studied as one method for rapidly generating hydrogen gas from a uranium hydride storage system. Small scale reactors, 2.9 g UH3, were used to study the process experimentally. Complimentary numerical simulations were used to better characterize and understand the strongly coupled chemical and thermal transport processes controlling hydrogen gas liberation. The results indicate that UH3 and O2 are sufficiently reactive to enable a well designed system to release gram quantities of hydrogen in approx. 2 seconds over a broad temperature range. The major system-design challenge appears to be heat management. In addition to the oxidation tests, H/D isotope exchange experiments were performed. The rate limiting step in the overall gas-to-particle exchange process was found to be hydrogen diffusion in the approx. 0.5 um hydride particles. The experiments generated a set of high quality experimental data; from which effective intra-particle diffusion coefficients can be inferred.