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INL reports findings on unusual quantum behavior of plutonium
Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory have discovered that plutonium hexaboride (PuB6) displays a type of unusual quantum property called a topological Kondo insulating state. Materials with this property are neither typical electricity conductors nor regular insulators. Rather, they have exterior surfaces that strongly conduct electricity and interiors that block electricity.
Motoo Fumizawa, Tomoaki Kunugi, Makoto Hishida, Mikio Akamatsu, Sadao Fujii, Minoru Igarashi
Nuclear Technology | Volume 110 | Number 2 | May 1995 | Pages 263-272
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT95-A35124
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
A three-dimensional thermal-hydraulic code using boundary-fitted coordinates systems has been developed to predict incompressible flows with complex geometries and large variations of physical properties. This code has been applied to a buoyancy-driven exchange flow in an enclosed space consisting of an upper and a lower hemisphere connected with a circular vertical pipe. The computational results have been compared with experiments. It was found that the computed heat transfer rate was smaller than that obtained from the experimental correlation in a single hemisphere at large Rayleigh number. This may be attributed to the effect on the flow behavior of a large variation of gas properties. Unsteady and asymmetric flow patterns such as observed in the experiments were numerically obtained in the vertical pipe.