When chemical potential continuity fails: kinetic interface models for hydrogen isotope transport

Abstract

Macroscopic hydrogen transport codes model material interfaces with local thermodynamic equilibrium (LTE), imposing continuity of chemical potential as a per-species constraint. Three assumptions hide in that condition: fast interfacial equilibration, a single exchange pathway between the two sides, and a carrier species known in advance on each side. The literature scrutinises the first, but the other two are the more consequential failures, and neither survives at a metal/molten-salt interface. We replace the constraint with reversible reaction channels at the interface that obey mass action, with detailed balance fixing each ratio of rate constants from the thermodynamic data that already parameterise LTE, and we implement the framework in festim. LTE is recovered as the fast-kinetics limit of a single channel, in both its Sieverts/Sieverts and its Sieverts/Henry form, so the framework generalises LTE and does not compete with it. A Damköhler number delimits validity within a channel, a branching ratio between channels. In a representative nickel/FLiBe system, hydrogen partitions kinetically between molecular and fluoride carriers. The apparent interfacial law then drifts between Sieverts and Henry with loading and salt redox state, and an LTE condition underestimates the steady permeating flux. The measured pressure exponent is set by the branching ratio, not by any fixed property of the salt; a redox sweep at fixed temperature should continuously shift it between 0.5 and 1. With two isotopes, two metal-side species feed five salt-side carriers, and a per-species LTE condition is ill-posed.