Reprocessing of lithium orthosilicate breeder material by remelting

Enhanced fabrication process for lithium orthosilicate pebbles as breeding material

“…The closed porosity is almost 0% and thus reduced compared to the value of 0.5-1% of pebbles produced with the standard process [6]. A significant reduction is also found for the open porosity.…”

“…The melt spraying process for pebble fabrication was setup at Schott AG, Mainz, and has already been detailed [6][7][8]. The setup, illustrated in Fig.…”

“…5 and 6). The typical microstructure of lithium orthosilicate pebbles as known from the standard process is revealed [6,9], featuring large domains of dendritically grown crystals made of lithium orthosilicate Li 4 SiO 4 and lithium orthodisilicate Li 6 Si 2 O 7 . In contrast to the standard process, no observable amount of amorphous pebbles was produced by the modified process.…”

“…An optimal fabrication process will also excel in terms of recycling. It has been demonstrated that a direct remelting outperforms wet-chemical reprocessing of sintered materials as large amounts of contaminated solvents can be avoided [6]. Because of this intrinsic benefit, the melt spraying process has been chosen to be optimized to meet all requirements for future fusion power plants mentioned above.…”

Solution based synthesis of mixed-phase materials in the Li2TiO3–Li4SiO4 system

“…Such methods readily allow the fabrication of pebbles with well controlled geometry, density and consistency and reprocessing by melting and by wet chemical methods has further been the subject of various research efforts [21,22]. In parallel, multiple solution based syntheses for lithium metatitanate and orthosilicate have been reported to date [23][24][25][26][27][28].…”