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From Capitol Hill: Nuclear is back, critical for America’s energy future
The U.S. House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy convened its first hearing of the year, “American Energy Dominance: Dawn of the New Nuclear Era,” on January 7, where lawmakers and industry leaders discussed how nuclear energy can help meet surging electricity demand driven by artificial intelligence, data centers, advanced manufacturing, and national security needs.
Shi-Xiang Qu, Yan-Hua Wu, Zhao-Zhong He, Kun Chen
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 189 | Number 3 | March 2018 | Pages 282-289
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2017.1405652
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The vortex diode is a key candidate for the equipment of the passive safety system of the molten salt reactor. Experimental studies to determine the diodicity (ratio of reverse flow Euler number to the forward flow Euler number at the same Reynolds number) using high-temperature molten salt are strongly limited because of the huge technical effort and financial requirements for such studies; moreover, possible solutions that involve a scaling method that uses surrogate fluid to obtain the diodicity must be validated. To determine the diodicity and verify the scaling method, an experiment using one kind of heat transfer oil (Dowtherm-a) as the surrogate fluid was carried out. In addition, a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation method was also adopted to study the flow characteristics in the vortex diode using three different fluids. The results show the following: it is feasible to study the diodicity of a vortex diode by a scaling experimental method using surrogate fluid, the CFD simulation method established in this paper can be applied to study the diodicity of the vortex diode, and the structure of the flow field and velocity distribution in the vortex chamber for reverse flow are independent of fluids and only related to the Reynolds number.