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Conference Spotlight
Nuclear Energy Conference & Expo (NECX)
September 8–11, 2025
Atlanta, GA|Atlanta Marriott Marquis
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Nuclear Technology
Fusion Science and Technology
August 2025
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Nuclear Dirigo
On April 22, 1959, Rear Admiral George J. King, superintendent of the Maine Maritime Academy, announced that following the completion of the 1960 training cruise, cadets would begin the study of nuclear engineering. Courses at that time included radiation physics, reactor control and instrumentation, reactor theory and engineering, thermodynamics, shielding, core design, reactor maintenance, and nuclear aspects.
Claudia Bogdan, Sebastian Brad, Horia Necula, Oleksandr Sirosh, Catalin Brill, Mihai Vijulie, Alin Lazar, Aleksandr Grafov
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 80 | Number 3 | May 2024 | Pages 443-454
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/15361055.2023.2259238
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The following properties are needed to increase the efficiency of refrigeration, liquefaction, and cryogenic separation cycles: Heat exchangers must have high effectiveness doubled by high compactness; small temperature differences between incoming and outgoing flows must be ensured to increase efficiency; there must be a large heat transfer surface, relative to the volume of the heat exchanger, to minimize heat loss; there must be a high heat transfer rate to reduce the transfer area; there must be a small pressure drop to reduce compression costs; and there must be high reliability with minimal maintenance. All these properties are entirely fulfilled by the designed matrix heat exchangers (MHEs). This paper presents the results of the research program developed by the team of the Cryogenic Laboratory from INC-DTCI ICSI Ramnicu Valcea, which included procedural stages of the realization and preliminary results of the characterization of the MHE-type heat exchanger in a narrow range of values to achieve a proper solution for a heat exchanger to be used for cryogenic purposes, such as cooling the gas mixture at the entrance of a distillation column of hydrogen isotopes and running at low pressure (typically regimes of 0.5 to 2.0 bars) and flows. Within several experimental campaigns, different assembly and testing techniques of the matrix heat exchanger (MHE) prototype were performed to achieve numerical data for the temperature and pressure drops along the heat exchanger and to verify ANSYS Fluent numerical simulation results. The results showed that for the designed and tested MHE prototype, a temperature drop of up to almost 230 K can be obtained at the established parameters correlated with pressure losses within a few millibars (the maximum recorded pressure drop is 80 mbars), small dimensions (64 mm high), and accessible weight (up to 2000 g).