Separation Performance of H₂/HD by Cryogenic Distillation

In order to study the behavior of hydrogen isotopes separation by cryogenic distillation, a computational method was constituted to obtain total stage number of distillation column based on experimental data and two separation tests were carried out with H₂/HD system. The total stage number is about 20 in the first test with natural hydrogen gas and is 24 in the second test with 1.0×10^-3 deuterium abundance hydrogen gas. The HETP value is in the range of 15-20 cm. The experiments show that the deuterium concentration in the condenser will increase with time if the total stage number is small， and theoretical prediction of deuterium concentration in reboiler is agree very well with experimental value. The fluctuations of liquid hydrogen level and temperature are also observed during experiment.