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Latest News
Strontium: Supply-and-demand success for the DOE’s Isotope Program
The Department of Energy’s Isotope Program (DOE IP) announced last week that it would end its “active standby” capability for strontium-82 production about two decades after beginning production of the isotope for cardiac diagnostic imaging. The DOE IP is celebrating commercialization of the Sr-82 supply chain as “a success story for both industry and the DOE IP.” Now that the Sr-82 market is commercially viable, the DOE IP and its National Isotope Development Center can “reassign those dedicated radioisotope production capacities to other mission needs”—including Sr-89.
Fatollah Tehranian, Mohamed A. Abdou
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 27 | Number 3 | May 1995 | Pages 298-313
Technical Paper | Blanket Engineering | doi.org/10.13182/FST95-A30392
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Accurate prediction of the thermomechanical responses of particle beds in fusion blankets depends strongly on the availability of experimental data on their thermal properties as a function of the blanket operating conditions. In this study, a series of experiments is conducted to measure the effective thermal conductivity and interface conductance of single-size aluminum, beryllium, and lithium zirconate particle beds as a function of applied external load in the 0- to 1.6-MPa range. Experiments are carried out with both helium and air as cover gas over a pressure range of 30 to 760 Torr. In both the aluminum and beryllium beds, as the applied load is increased to 1.5 MPa, the effective thermal conductivity increases by a factor of ∼3 to 7 in an air cover gas and by a factor of ∼2 to 3 in helium. With 1.2-mm lithium zirconate particles and air or helium as the cover gas, changes in the bed thermal conductivity when the applied load is varied in the 0 to 1.6-MPa range are small and within the experimental error. The increase in the interface conductance values with applied external load shows variations similar to those of the thermal conductivity. Based on the Hertz elastic equation and finite element models, the particle-to-particle contact areas as a function of the applied external load are evaluated and used in a predictive model by Bauer, Schlunder, and Zehner to calculate the effective thermal conductivity of a beryllium particle bed as a function of external pressure. The experimental results are in good agreement with the model predictions.