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2025 ANS Annual Conference
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Chicago, IL|Chicago Marriott Downtown
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High-temperature plumbing and advanced reactors
The use of nuclear fission power and its role in impacting climate change is hotly debated. Fission advocates argue that short-term solutions would involve the rapid deployment of Gen III+ nuclear reactors, like Vogtle-3 and -4, while long-term climate change impact would rely on the creation and implementation of Gen IV reactors, “inherently safe” reactors that use passive laws of physics and chemistry rather than active controls such as valves and pumps to operate safely. While Gen IV reactors vary in many ways, one thing unites nearly all of them: the use of exotic, high-temperature coolants. These fluids, like molten salts and liquid metals, can enable reactor engineers to design much safer nuclear reactors—ultimately because the boiling point of each fluid is extremely high. Fluids that remain liquid over large temperature ranges can provide good heat transfer through many demanding conditions, all with minimal pressurization. Although the most apparent use for these fluids is advanced fission power, they have the potential to be applied to other power generation sources such as fusion, thermal storage, solar, or high-temperature process heat.1–3
Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Sun
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1721-1739
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1749481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten salts have been proposed as heat transfer media due to their superior thermal performance at elevated temperatures. A number of heat transfer correlations have been proposed in the literature for molten salts without explicitly considering the radiative heat transfer effect in the salts, which may not be negligible. This study therefore attempts to (1) quantitatively analyze the convective and radiative heat transfer of molten salts using an overall heat transfer model that includes a radiative heat transfer model developed in this research and an existing conventional convective heat transfer model/correlation, such as the Sieder-Tate or Hausen correlation, and (2) provide rationale on under what conditions it is necessary to consider the radiative heat transfer effect in salts. A parametric study was performed using the radiative heat transfer model developed to investigate the effects of various input variables, including the tube size (inner diameter 5 to 50 mm), salt temperature (500°C to 1000°C), salt and wall temperature difference (5°C to 100°C), and salt absorption coefficient (1 to 100 m-1). Our study indicates that (1) the proposed overall heat transfer model reasonably predicts the salt convective and radiative heat transfer, (2) the radiative heat transfer is more important for laminar flows than transitional and turbulent flows, (3) the radiative heat transfer is more important in tubes of larger inner diameter, (4) the salt temperature affects the radiative heat transfer significantly while the temperature difference between the salt and wall has a slightly smaller effect for the range investigated (ΔT = 5°C to 100°C), and (5) the salt absorption coefficient significantly affects the salt radiative heat transfer.