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What’s the most difficult question you’ve been asked as a maintenance instructor?
Blye Widmar
"Where are the prints?!"
This was the final question in an onslaught of verbal feedback, comments, and critiques I received from my students back in 2019. I had two years of instructor experience and was teaching a class that had been meticulously rehearsed in preparation for an accreditation visit. I knew the training material well and transferred that knowledge effectively enough for all the students to pass the class. As we wrapped up, I asked the students how they felt about my first big system-level class, and they did not hold back.
“Why was the exam from memory when we don’t work from memory in the plant?” “Why didn’t we refer to the vendor documents?” “Why didn’t we practice more on the mock-up?” And so on.
H. B. Xu, R. Guo, Z. Cao, M. Li, X. L. Liu, B. Zhang, HL-2A Team
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 79 | Number 2 | February 2023 | Pages 162-167
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2022.2131162
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Pellet injection (PI) is the preferred fueling method in the future fusion reactor. It is particularly important to study the flow field characteristics of the frozen fuel extrusion process for the future steady operation of the pellet injector. In order to study the influence of groove depth on extrusion flux and conveying capacity, the flow field characteristics of a repetitive pellet injector with a single-screw extruder in the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) was numerically simulated with POLYFLOW software. Thus, information about pressure field, viscous heating, and velocity field distribution was obtained. The results indicate that to a certain extent, increasing the groove depth (while maintaining the gaps between the screw and extrusion cylinder) is beneficial for the conveying capacity and pressure building capacity. The results of the numerical simulations show that at a screw speed of 120 rpm, screw outer diameter of 20 mm, screw length of 230 mm, screw groove depth of 6 mm, and screw prism gap of 0.3 mm, solid hydrogen can be stably extruded, and the velocity of the extruded ice at the nozzle is 0.15 m/s, which meets the design requirement of the CFETR PI system. These results also provide good references for structure design and performance optimization of the CFETR pellet injector.