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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
S. Siriano, A. Tassone, G. Caruso
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 77 | Number 2 | February 2021 | Pages 144-158
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2020.1858671
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Liquid metals offer unique properties and their use in a nuclear fusion reactor, both as confined flows and free-surface flow, is widely studied in the fusion community. The interaction between this conductive fluid and the tokamak magnetic fields leads to magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) phenomena that influence the flow features. To properly design components that employ liquid metals, it is necessary to accurately predict these features, and although the efforts have been made in development, a mature code specifically customized to simulate MHD flows is still unavailable. In this work, the general purpose computational fluid dynamics code ANSYS CFX 18.2 is validated for MHD free-surface thin-film flow with insulated walls up to and for several values of the characteristic width/thickness ratio, comparing the results with the theoretical relation available in the literature. For all the cases considered, the maximum integral error is found to be below 10%. Successively, the validated code is used to investigate the MHD flow in a chute with a characteristic film ratio equal to 0.1 and for . Uniform and nonuniform wall electrical conductivity cases are considered with the latter modeled by placing on the side walls and on the back wall localized regions with different conductivity. The electrical conductivity of the back wall is found to have a negligible effect on the global flow when the lateral wall is insulated, similarly to what is observed for the analogous bounded flow. Contrariwise, an electrically conductive lateral wall is found to enhance the free-surface jet and to modify the Hartmann layer structure.