Abstract
The handling and analysis of gaseous tritium is of interest for hydrogen isotope separation experiments. In this work, we present an easy-to-handle setup for catalytic oxidation to HTO, recovering all of the initially dosed gaseous tritium as determined by LSC, using CuO as a catalyst at a reaction temperature of 900 °C. Aiming to reduce cocktail waste, the LSC determination was downscaled to a microfluidic setup. The performance was evaluated based on the counting efficiency, which was shown to decrease significantly, as the sample volume was reduced to µl amounts, while no changes were observed over a wide range of sample-to-cocktail ratios.
Funding source: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
Award Identifier / Grant number: 443871192 – GRK 2721 “Hydrogen Isotopes 1,2,3H"
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Dr. Jürgen Wendel and Stefan Welte (Tritium Laboratory Karlsruhe, Germany) for helping with their expertise in handling gaseous tritium.
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Research ethics: Not applicable.
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Author contributions: A. B., H. L. and C. F. wrote the manuscript. A. B. conducted the experiments. J. P. B. designed the microfluidic setup. C. F. and D. B. conceptualized the methodology and supervised the investigations. The authors have accepted responsibility for the entire content of this manuscript and approved its submission.
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Competing interests: The authors state no conflict of interest.
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Research funding: This project is funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) – Project-ID 443871192 – GRK 2721 “Hydrogen Isotopes 1,2,3H”.
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Data availability: The research data associated with this publication is available upon request in the RODARE repository under the DOI 10.14278/rodare.2671.
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