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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Akira Sakurai, Masahiro Shiotsu, Koichi Hata
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 88 | Number 3 | November 1984 | Pages 321-330
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.13182/NSE84-A18586
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Film-boiling heat transfer on a horizontal test heater in a pool of saturated and subcooled water was investigated at pressures ranging from 20 kPa to 2 MPa. Platinum rods of 0.7, 1.2, 2, 3, and 5 mm in diameter were used as the test heater. A semiempirical equation and a modified Bromley equation were given, both of which could express the saturated film-boiling heat transfer coefficients within ±5% error. The heat transfer coefficients for a certain range of heater diameters under saturated and subcooled conditions were expressed within ±10% error by the two-phase boundary-layer film-boiling model with the boundary condition of equal liquid and vapor interfacial velocities. Pressure dependence of the minimum film-boiling temperature for pressure <1.1 MPa was clearly different from that for pressure >1.1 MPa. Minimum temperature in the lower pressure region seems to be determined by the hydrodynamic Taylor instability and that in the higher pressure region by the heterogeneous spontaneous nucleation limit. However, minimum temperature and heat flux of saturated film boiling in the former region did not agree with those of conventional equations based on the Taylor instability. Empirical equations of interfacial wave length, departing bubble diameter, and frequency near the minimum film-boiling temperature for the lower pressure region were given. Minimum temperature and heat flux equations were presented based on these empirical equations.