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A year in orbit: ISS deployment tests radiation detectors for future space missions
The predawn darkness on a cool Florida night was shattered by the ignition of nine Merlin engines on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. The thrust of the engines shook the ground miles away. From a distance, the rocket appeared to slowly rise above the horizon. For the cargo onboard, the launch was anything but gentle, as the ignition of liquid oxygen generated more than 1.5 million pounds of force. After the rocket had been out of sight for several minutes, the booster dramatically returned to Earth with several sonic booms in a captivating show of engineering designed to make space travel less expensive and more sustainable.
Jimmy Martin, Pierre Ruyer, Matthieu Duponcheel, Yann Bartosiewicz
Nuclear Technology | Volume 211 | Number 10 | October 2025 | Pages 2326-2342
Research Article | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2024.2411835
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Gravity-driven flashing of superheated water, the topic of this paper, is a phase change phenomenon that is tightly linked with some of the safety issues of a spent-fuel-pool loss-of-cooling accident. As detailed in this article, the phenomenon has been empirically studied and characterized within the Aquarius laboratory-scale experimental device. Primarily, the performed tests unveil the occurrence conditions of the gravity-driven flashing phenomenon in a pool heated from below and its coupling with the degassing of dissolved gases that may take place within the liquid. Next, a set of dimensionless correlations describing the studied heat and mass transfers is derived from the data and presented for both the single-phase and the two-phase regimes of any conducted test. Then, a lumped-parameter model, relying on those correlations and describing the studied physics, is introduced. The model resolves the coupled mass and energy balance equations of the heated liquid pool. Last, this model is used to simulate a selected reference test. The performed simulations are successfully compared with the available empirical data, with moderate discrepancies, thereby verifying the adequateness of the proposed model.