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Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
Joint NEA project performs high-burnup test
An article in the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s July news bulletin noted that a first test has been completed for the High Burnup Experiments in Reactivity Initiated Accident (HERA) project. The project aim is to understand the performance of light water reactor fuel at high burnup under reactivity-initiated accidents (RIA).
Kimberly A. DeFriend, Brent Espinoza, Brian Patterson
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 51 | Number 4 | May 2007 | Pages 693-700
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/FST07-A1466
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The sol-gel methods applied in the synthesis of aerogels lead to the formation of a disordered silica network. The resulting aerogel has poor structural definition that leads to poor mechanical properties. The work presented details our efforts to create a new hierarchical mesoporous silica aerogel. These meso-porous aerogels were formed utilizing a templating technique using polystyrene beads with varying diameters, 50 nm to 2 m, dispersed during sol-gel polymerization. The resulting gel was super-critically dried creating a silica aerogel templated with polystyrene beads. The polystyrene beads were then thermal oxidized creating meso-porous silica aerogel monolith. The surface area, pore volume, pore diameter, and mechanical properties of the templated aerogels were determined. Interestingly the mechanical properties of the meso-porous aerogel were significantly improved. These improvements appear to be directly related to the polystyrene bead diameter and loading.