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Wendelstein 7-X designing 2-MW gyrotrons to upgrade heating system
The Max Planck Institute for Plasma Physics (IPP) announced yesterday that it is developing 2-MW gyrotrons to be used as the main plasma heating system of the Wendelstein 7-X (W7-X).
W7-X, located at IPP, is currently the largest superconducting stellarator facility in the world. The project conducts research aimed at filling key knowledge and technology gaps for developing a stellarator-based power plant.
Marina Sessim, Michael R. Tonks
Nuclear Technology | Volume 207 | Number 7 | July 2021 | Pages 1004-1014
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2021.1910005
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Nuclear thermal propulsion (NTP) provides a consistent source of thrust for long space missions. However, fuel development for NTP reactors is a major technological hurdle. Existing modeling and simulation tools developed by the U.S. Nuclear Engineering Advanced Modeling and Simulation (NEAMS) program for power reactors can be leveraged to help accelerate the fuel development. This work is a preliminary demonstration of the application of NEAMS tools to model NTP fuel. Specifically, the fuel performance tool BISON and the mesoscale reactor materials tool MARMOT are used to develop a multiscale model of thermal transport in a W-UO2 CERMET fuel element for NTP reactors. Three-dimensional simulations in MARMOT are used to estimate the effective thermal conductivity (ETC) of fresh CERMET fuel at temperatures ranging from 1500 K to 3000 K. The ETC values from MARMOT are then used in BISON simulations that predict the steady-state temperature profile throughout a 61-subchannel hexagonal fuel element. The temperature varies by 83 K throughout the fuel element, with the highest temperature occurring near the outer edges of the element. BISON is also used to show that the temperature profile in prototype fuel elements with fewer subchannels does not vary significantly from that in the 61-subchannel element.