Distillation and stripping pilot plants for the JUNO neutrino detector: design, operations and reliability

Abstract

This paper describes the design, construction principles and operations of the distillation and stripping pilot plants tested at the Daya Bay Neutrino Laboratory, with the perspective to adapt this processes, system cleanliness and leak-tightness to the final full scale plants that will be used for the purification of the liquid scintillator used in the JUNO neutrino detector. The main goal of these plants is to remove radio impurities from the liquid scintillator while increasing its optical attenuation length. Purification of liquid scintillator will be performed with a system combining alumina oxide, distillation, water extraction and steam (or N2 gas) stripping. Such a combined system will aim at obtaining a total attenuation length greater than 20 m at 430 nm, and a bulk radiopurity for 238U and 232Th in the 10-15 to 10-17 g/g range. The pilot plants commissioning and operation have also provided valuable information on the degree of reliability of their main components, which will be particularly useful for the design of the final full scale purification equipment for the JUNO liquid scintillator. This paper describe two of the five pilot plants since the Alumina Column, Fluor mixing and the Water Extraction plants are in charge of the Chinese part of the collaboration.

References in corpus (3)

• Observation of electron-antineutrino disappearance at Daya Bay
• Improved measurements of the neutrino mixing angle ${\theta }_{13}$ with the Double Chooz detector
• A Scintillator Purification System for the Borexino Solar Neutrino Detector

Cited by in corpus (10)

• Review of Novel Approaches to Organic Liquid Scintillators in Neutrino Physics
• Feasibility and physics potential of detecting ${}^8$B solar neutrinos at JUNO
• Development of water extraction system for liquid scintillatorpurification of JUNO
• Combining Hybrid and Opaque Scintillator Techniques in the Search for Double Beta Plus Decays
• Optimization of the JUNO liquid scintillator composition using a Daya Bay antineutrino detector
• Sub-GeV Dark Matter Direct Detection with Neutrino Observatories
• Status and Prospects of the JUNO Experiment
• The replacement system of the JUNO liquid scintillator pilot experiment at Daya Bay
• Photomultiplier Requirements and Pre-Calibration for the SABRE South Liquid Scintillator Veto
• Signatures of supermassive charged gravitinos in liquid scintillator detectors