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Latest News
Dragonfly, a Pu-fueled drone heading to Titan, gets key NASA approval
Curiosity landed on Mars sporting a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) in 2012, and a second NASA rover, Perseverance, landed in 2021. Both are still rolling across the red planet in the name of science. Another exploratory craft with a similar plutonium-238–fueled RTG but a very different mission—to fly between multiple test sites on Titan, Saturn’s largest moon—recently got one step closer to deployment.
On April 25, NASA and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (APL) announced that the Dragonfly mission to Saturn’s icy moon passed its critical design review. “Passing this mission milestone means that Dragonfly’s mission design, fabrication, integration, and test plans are all approved, and the mission can now turn its attention to the construction of the spacecraft itself,” according to NASA.
Masanori Araki, Kazuyoshi Sato, Satoshi Suzuki, Masato Akiba
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 29 | Number 4 | July 1996 | Pages 519-528
Technical Paper | Divertor System | doi.org/10.13182/FST96-A30695
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Development of high-heat-flux components such as the divertor plate of fusion experimental machines is essential for removal of high heat loads with heating on one side. For this purpose, the authors machined a tube with an inside wall like a nut, namely, a screw tube, to enhance heat transfer efficiency and simplify the machining process. The screw tube is compared with a swirl tube, originally developed by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and the Hypervapotron, developed by Joint European Torus (JET). The spirally machined inside wall can enlarge the heat transfer area and make a little vortex flow only close to the wall. The performance of the screw tube is characterized by a critical-heat-flux experiment that uses water flow velocities ranging from 4 to 20 m/s with a water inlet pressure of 1.0 MPa. As a result, the screw tube has a higher incidence of CHFs compared with the smooth tube and the Hypervapotron and performs similarly to the swirl tube at identical flow velocities.
