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Flow and Heat Transfer in Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactors

A special issue of Energies (ISSN 1996-1073). This special issue belongs to the section "B4: Nuclear Energy".

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 28 February 2025 | Viewed by 890

Special Issue Editor


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Guest Editor
Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China
Interests: reactor thermal hydraulics; fundamentals on flow and heat transfer

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleague,

Gas-cooled reactors have promising applications in electricity generation, cogeneration, and industrial process heat. Two of six Gen IV nuclear systems candidates are gas-cooled reactors, i.e., very high-temperature reactors and gas-cooled fast reactors. Smaller-scale gas-cooled reactors can be deployed in remote areas or in space as electricity or power suppliers.

Gas flow and heat transfer are fundamental to the thermal hydraulic design and safety analysis of gas-cooled reactors. New gas coolants, such as helium–xenon mixtures and supercritical carbon dioxide, need to be investigated for their thermal properties, as do turbulence models in novel gas-cooled nuclear systems. The complex geometries of reactor cores make it difficult to identify flow and heat transfer features. High-temperature operation conditions highlight the effect of thermal radiation, combined with conduction and convection, in gas flow and heat transfer. A deeper understanding of gas flow and heat transfer is necessary in order to promote gas-cooled nuclear reactors among designers, regulators, and investors.

We invite academics and researchers to submit their original and unpublished manuscripts to this Special Issue. Topics suitable for this Special Issue include, but are not limited to:

  • Thermal hydraulic analyses in high temperature gas-cooled reactors;
  • Thermal hydraulic analyses in gas-cooled micro/space reactors;
  • Modeling, simulations, or experiments of gas flow and heat transfer in nuclear energy systems;
  • Advances in fundamentals of gas flow and heat transfer.

Dr. Jun Sun
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

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Keywords

  • high-temperature gas-cooled reactors
  • gas-cooled micro/space reactors
  • thermal hydraulics
  • modeling
  • simulations
  • experiments
  • gas flow and heat transfer

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Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

15 pages, 3092 KiB  
Article
Dynamic Modeling of a HeXe-Cooled Mobile Nuclear Reactor with Closed Brayton Cycle
by Jiaolong Deng, Chaoran Guan, Xiaojing Liu and Xiang Chai
Energies 2024, 17(21), 5396; https://doi.org/10.3390/en17215396 - 30 Oct 2024
Viewed by 432
Abstract
Helium-xenon (HeXe)-cooled mobile nuclear reactors have promising potential in future low-carbon energy systems. However, there is currently a lack of fast and reliable tools for analyzing the complicated dynamic characteristics of such systems. In this study, we developed a comprehensive dynamic modeling approach [...] Read more.
Helium-xenon (HeXe)-cooled mobile nuclear reactors have promising potential in future low-carbon energy systems. However, there is currently a lack of fast and reliable tools for analyzing the complicated dynamic characteristics of such systems. In this study, we developed a comprehensive dynamic modeling approach for a HeXe-cooled nuclear power system coupled with a closed Brayton cycle (CBC). The system’s key components, including the reactor, printed circuit heat exchanger (PCHE), and turbomachinery, are lumped-modeled to capture their time-varying behavior. A step-solving algorithm that incorporates HeXe mass conservation iteration is designed. The verification results demonstrate that the dynamic program is robust and reliable, with each time step converging within 25 iterations and the HeXe mass remaining within the range of 3.755 ± 0.01 kg throughout the simulation meeting the law of mass conservation. Then, a 1500 s frozen start-up simulation for the coupled system is conducted, in which the CBC is started in the first 500 s by increasing the main shaft speed to 40% of the rated value, and then the reactor is started by inserting external reactivity between 500 and 800 s. Both the dynamic process and the steady-state performance after the start-up are analyzed. The results show that the system achieved a stable electrical output of 5.7 MWe with a thermal efficiency of 32.5%. This study lays a solid foundation for future work aimed at improving the overall efficiency and performance of HeXe-cooled nuclear power systems. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Flow and Heat Transfer in Gas-Cooled Nuclear Reactors)
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