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Texas A&M welcomes uranium conversion research
The Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES) has signed a research agreement with Quantum Leap Energy (QLE) “to advance and de-risk the commercial production of high-purity uranium hexafluoride (UF6).”
QLE is an Austin, Texas–based subsidiary of ASP Isotopes (ASPI), which is developing an isotope enrichment platform for applications in nuclear energy, nuclear medicine, and semiconductors. QLE specializes in the uranium conversion step of the nuclear fuel cycle—the conversion of yellowcake uranium concentrate (U3O8) into UF6 prior to enrichment.
Jiaqi Chen, Caleb S. Brooks
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 197 | Number 5 | May 2023 | Pages 886-906
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2022.2103347
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
The axial-flow centrifugal bubble separator designed for the gaseous fission product removal system in liquid-fueled molten salt reactors is simulated using the Eulerian two-fluid model coupled with the Adaptive Multiple Size Group method to account for the significant coalescence and breakup in the bubble separator. The behavior of the gas core in the bubble separator is mimicked by the symmetric interfacial area concentration model. The separator efficiency, local velocity, and pressure profiles at various conditions are compared with experimental data. Good agreement is found between the experiment and the simulation for the separator efficiency. With the coalescence and breakup being accounted for, the effect of the inlet void fraction on the separator efficiency is correctly captured. For the local pressure and velocity profiles, the agreement is only quantitative due to the simplifications on the geometry and potential limitations of the current computational fluid dynamics models. As good agreement is found for the separator efficiency, the sensitivity study is performed for various operational and design parameters with further simplified two-dimensional axisymmetric simulation.