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AI and productivity growth
Craig Piercycpiercy@ans.org
This month’s issue of Nuclear News focuses on supply and demand. The “supply” part of the story highlights nuclear’s continued success in providing electricity to the grid more than 90 percent of the time, while the “demand” part explores the seemingly insatiable appetite of hyperscale data centers for steady, carbon-free energy.
Technically, we are in the second year of our AI epiphany, the collective realization that Big Tech’s energy demands are so large that they cannot be met without a historic build-out of new generation capacity. Yet the enormity of it all still seems hard to grasp.
or the better part of two decades, U.S. electricity demand has been flat. Sure, we’ve seen annual fluctuations that correlate with weather patterns and the overall domestic economic performance, but the gigawatt-hours of electricity America consumed in 2021 are almost identical to our 2007 numbers.
Salman Alzahrani (Missouri S&T/KACST), Shoaib Usman (Missouri S&T)
Proceedings | Advances in Thermal Hydraulics 2018 | Orlando, FL, November 11-15, 2018 | Pages 1189-1201
Twisted-tape is one of the most important members of passive heat transfer augmentation techniques for forced convection in many applications. In this paper, a numerical investigation of the heat transfer, pressure drop and secondary flow under the normal operating conditions of the NuScale SMR reactor for sub-channel with and without twisted tape geometry are performed. 3D models for twisted tapes on 2 x 2 rod bundle inside spacer grid fitted was developed. Subsequently, a twisted tapes on 2 x 2 along the entire sub-channel, that spacer grid and the gap between spaces were evaluated through the comparison with no twist tapes and with several twist ratios (p/d = 4.2, 1.7 and 0.85). The results have revealed a strong effect of twist ratios on pressure drop and secondary flow (SF) increases with decreasing twist ratio. Moreover, the Nusselt number (Nu) is increased with Reynolds number (Re) and there is a significant improvement in the Nusselt number when a twisted tape is inserted into the entire sub-channel under the same Reynolds number. For p/d=0.85, heat transfer (Nu) enhancement of 25% and 101% was observed for twisted tapes inside spacer grid and the entire sub-channel respectively. Results showed that the pressure drop with twisted tapes inside spacer grid and the entire sub-channel are influenced by variation of twisted ratio. The highest pressure drop is achieved for the twist ratio of p/d =0.85 which is the lowest twist ratio in this study. Pressure drop showed an almost linear dependence on the twist ratios. Likewise, the secondary flow is observed to be much more pronounced when the entire channel length contained the twisted tape. Interestingly, SF seems to be peaking at the exit point of the spacer grid where the twisted tape ends. SF seems along the entire sub-channel when the entire length contained the tape. The highest SF is achieved for the twisted ratio (p/d =0.85) which is the lowest twist ratio in this study by about SF=.0.16.