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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.
Toshiharu Muramatsu, Hisashi Ninokata
Nuclear Technology | Volume 113 | Number 1 | January 1996 | Pages 54-72
Technical Paper | Heat Transfer and Fluid Flow | doi.org/10.13182/NT96-A35199
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Two thermohydraulics computer programs AQUA and DINUS-3, which are represented by both time- and volume-averaged transport analysis and direct numerical simulation of turbulence, respectively, were developed and validated for the evaluation of thermal striping phenomena. These codes were incorporated with higher order difference schemes to approximate the convection terms in conservation equations and adaptive time-step size control systems based on the fuzzy theory to eliminate numerical instabilities. From validation analyses with fundamental experiments in water and sodium, it was concluded that (a) thermal striping conditions such as spatial distributions of the intensity and the frequency of the fluid temperature fluctuations can be estimated efficiently by a combined approach incorporating the AQUA code and the DINUS-3 code, and (b) the thermal striping phenomena for the in-vessel components of actual liquid-metal-cooled fast reactors can be evaluated by the numerical method without conventional approaches such as large scale model experiments using sodium.