Study on pump combinations for improving delivery rates of hydrogen

The tritium compatible pumps are utilized for the transportation of the hydrogen isotopes as the main reactants of the nuclear fusion power plant. The storage and delivery system, one of main systems of the fuel cycle in the nuclear fusion power plant, has a function of the high fuelling throughput to the fuelling system and the neutral beam injection system. However, few tritium compatible pumps have generally been proposed for the delivery of hydrogen isotopes.One of tritium compatible pumps, MB 601 which has the largest throughput among metal bellows pumps, is selected for the performance test using SPOVE equipment. For two cases of heads-in-parallel and heads-in-series types of MB 601, single pump models are developed under the isothermal and non-isothermal conditions. The dominant parameters of pump models are estimated and compared with the experimental data. It was found that the estimated pumping speeds of the combination of two MB 601 pumps are in agreement with the experimental results. Based on the comparison among combinations of two MB 601 pumps, a parallel combination of heads-in-series types has more pumping speed than others in the range of PS/ PD ∈ (0.3,1).