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Fusion Science and Technology
Latest News
High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
J. D. Rader, B. H. Mills, D. L. Sadowski, M. Yoda, S. I. Abdel-Khalik
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 64 | Number 2 | August 2013 | Pages 315-319
Divertor and High-Heat-Flux Components | Proceedings of the Twentieth Topical Meeting on the Technology of Fusion Energy (TOFE-2012) (Part 1), Nashville, Tennessee, August 27-31, 2012 | doi.org/10.13182/FST13-A18096
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The helium-cooled modular divertor concept with integrated pin array developed by the Karlsruhe Research Center (FZK) is unusual among helium-cooled tungsten divertor designs in that it relies upon an array of pin fins on the back of the cooled surface, instead of jet impingement, to cool the plasma-facing surface. The Georgia Tech group experimentally studied a similar design constructed of brass which combined jet impingement with an array of identical cylindrical pin fins using air at nondimensional coolant mass flow rates, i.e. Reynolds numbers, which spanned the range expected under prototypical conditions. The results suggested that the pin-fin array, at least for the particular geometry studied, provides little, if any, additional cooling beyond that provided by jet impingement.Given that this earlier study considered only one pin-fin array geometry, however, a numerical study was performed to investigate whether changes in the array geometry could improve performance. Specifically, numerical simulations using the commercially available computational fluid dynamics software package ANSYS® 14.0 was used to examine how varying the pitch-to-diameter ratio for the fin array and the height of the fins affected average pressure boundary temperature and the pressure drop across the divertor. These results can, with appropriate experimental validation, be used to determine whether pin-fin arrays can be used to improve the thermal performance of helium-cooled tungsten divertors.