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2025 ANS Winter Conference & Expo
November 9–12, 2025
Washington, DC|Washington Hilton
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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
High temperature fission chambers engineered for AMR/SMR safety and performance
As the global energy landscape shifts towards safer, smaller, and more flexible nuclear power, Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) and Gen. IV* technologies are at the forefront of innovation. These advanced designs pose new challenges in size, efficiency, and operating environment that traditional instrumentation and control solutions aren’t always designed to handle.
A. Abou-Sena, A. Ying, M. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 44 | Number 1 | July 2003 | Pages 79-84
Technical Paper | Fusion Energy - MFE Chamber Technology | doi.org/10.13182/FST03-A314
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Beryllium, in its pebble form, has been proposed in various blanket concepts to serve different purposes. Thermal property data for such a heterogeneous packed bed is needed, particularly data on the impact of compression forces on its magnitude and consequent temperature profile. The objectives of this work are to obtain and quantify experimental data on the effective thermal conductivity of a Be-He packed bed, on the interface heat conductance between Be and SiC, and on the effects of externally applied pressure on these effective thermal properties. The effective thermal conductivity of a Be-He pebble bed increases as the bed mean temperature increases. The values of effective thermal conductivity vary from 2.15 to 3.00 W/m.K for bed mean temperature ranges from 90 to 420 °C. Similar temperature effects are seen in the Be/SiC interface heat conductance, as the values of interface heat conductance range from 1140 to 2200 W/m2.K. In addition, effective thermal conductivity increases remarkably with the increase of applied pressure (by a factor of 2.53 at 2 MPa), while it remains higher than the initial value by ~0.3 W/m.K when external pressure is released (hysteresis effect).