Abstract:
High concentrate heavy water was used as moderator or coolant in a reactor, and its concentration directly effects the safety and performance of the reactor. The samples were generally taken from the process system manually and then analyzed with infra-red spectrophotometry in the laboratory off-line. This study was carried out to quantify high concentrate heavy water of process system accurately, quickly and safely. In this work, infrared absorption spectrum of different concentrations of standard heavy water were gotten on the Fourier infra-red spectrometer off-line, with the single beam spectrum of empty optical path as the background spectrum. A working curve between the absorbance at the wavenumber of 3 410 cm
-1 and concentrations of heavy water was established with linear function. On this basis, the program of high concentration heavy water on-line measurement was designed. The measurement method is accurate, rapid, non-destructive and without irradiation. For 99.85% heavy water concentration, the relative standard deviation was better than 0.01%. When the deter mined range of heavy water was 99.06%-99.98%, the linear correlation coefficient
R2 was 0.999 9. This method could also be extended to determine heavy water with other concentration ranges.