Introduction and Participation

 

The project “Hydrogen Detectors” was one of many the Research Institute of Experimental Physics of Russian Federal Nuclear Center has been developing including input from selection of other Institutions and foreign collaborators in accordance with the goals initially stated in 90s by international community in pursuing the non-proliferation of arms. 

The studies and the issues of our interest in this project are outlined below following the official program.

 

It is known that the interaction of some metal oxides with hydrogen occurs at a sufficiently low process activation energy.

The investigation of the process of hydrogen interaction with inter-metallic compounds and carbon nanomaterials (fullerenes and their derivatives, open nanotubes, hollow nanofibres, graphite oxide) has the fundamental and applied value for the sensor material development. Preliminary results indicate prospects of such type of new materials for the absorption of considerable hydrogen amounts.

Within the framework of this project, various methods of the application of catalytic additives for the improvement of sensor material properties will be developed by the efforts of researchers of the All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics together with their colleagues from other research organisations. In addition, the influence of special preliminary treatment of sensor material surfaces will also be studied ( -irradiation, surface activation by low-temperature plasma, annealing in vacuum, heating in oxygen, etc.) on their hydrogen-absorbing and other physical and chemical properties. The investigation of sensor material surfaces will be carried out by such electronic-emission spectroscopy methods as roentgen photo-electronic spectroscopy, Auger spectroscopy and spectroscopy of electron energy losses. The certification of all samples being studied will be carried out by means of chemical and roentgen-phase analysis, IR and KR spectroscopy. The replacement of a small amount of metal atoms of the sensor metal chosen with iron atoms at the stage of sensor material preparation will allow to monitor phase transformations in the sensor material chosen – metal oxide by the Moessbauer spectroscopy method. A special attention will be paid to the analysis of reasons for the material deactivating and the elaboration of recommendations on optimal operation regimes.

The process of reversible interaction of inter-metallic compounds and carbon nanomaterials with hydrogen will be investigated including those doped with other metals, with the use of modern analysis method. In the course of project implementation, the following will be determined: amount of reversible hydrogen, heat reaction effects, equilibrium diagrams; the optimal reversible interaction regimes will be established; the influence of gases accompanying hydrogen on the sorption and desorption processes will be studied. Compounds with required operating features will be developed.

         Few areas which we believe to be in part useful for the project fulfillment and in part have some general interest for the scaled treatment of processes in heterogeneous media we have been participating in the project’s “Hydrogen Detectors” planned activities. The most obvious issues related to this project we work for are:

 

1)  The physics of surface phenomena (as polarization, sorption, transport,etc.) would be introduced directly into the upper scale coupled electrodynamics-heat transfer modeling governing equations  allowing one to simulate exact interfacial processes in a heterogeneous sensor’s sample (sometimes the highly porous material) which is the scaled medium, with the local-nonlocal electrodynamics-heat- and mass transport fields.

   

2)  The full two-scale heat transport and electrodynamics governing equations were used to achieve understanding of the possible mechanisms that play a role in shaping the effective (measured) coefficients of thermal and electrical conductivities in sensor’s sample material.

 

3)  The combination of VAT scaled (at least two scales involved) based equations and the theory of statistical design of experiment would be used to effectively treating multiparameter sensor performance optimization volumes.

 

4)  The prior results obtained have depicted that using scaled parameters better represent the needs of a design process for two-scale devices as hydrogen detector than the one scale usual parameters used at present.

 

 

Organisations dealing with the development and operation of domestic and foreign NPP, heat-and-power plants, organisations dealing with the development and operation of aerospace complex objects, developers of prospective designs of thermonuclear installations (ITEP, etc.) can be interested in the implementation of this project. The device may be of interest to enterprises dealing with processing and transportation of petroleum and gas products.