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Human Factors, Instrumentation & Controls
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International Conference on Mathematics and Computational Methods Applied to Nuclear Science and Engineering (M&C 2025)
April 27–30, 2025
Denver, CO|The Westin Denver Downtown
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Latest News
Argonne’s METL gears up to test more sodium fast reactor components
Argonne National Laboratory has successfully swapped out an aging cold trap in the sodium test loop called METL (Mechanisms Engineering Test Loop), the Department of Energy announced April 23. The upgrade is the first of its kind in the United States in more than 30 years, according to the DOE, and will help test components and operations for the sodium-cooled fast reactors being developed now.
G. Dell'Orco, M. Simoncini, D. Zito, G. Vella
Fusion Science and Technology | Volume 39 | Number 2 | March 2001 | Pages 644-648
Fusion Materials | doi.org/10.13182/FST01-A11963311
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Both the EU Long Term Programmes for DEMO and the ITER R&D foresee the thermal-mechanical qualification of the beryllium, as neutron multiplier, and lithium orthosilicate or lithium metatitanate as breeder ceramics pebble beds. FZK has performed measurements on the pebble bed thermal-mechanical properties using cylindrical test sections. Using an alternative approach, ENEA, has launched similar testing on the SMARTS mock-up, reproducing on a small scale the reactor reference plane geometry1 instead. The tests have shown that the pebble bed thermal behaviour is strongly affected by the initial filling Packing Factor (PF). In fact, the higher the PF, the higher the thermal conductivity of the bed. Therefore, if the neutron multiplication needs an increase in the pebble PF, the only possibility is to adopt binary pebble beds (small pebbles infiltrating between larger ones) as an alternative to the mono-sized lattice. Using binary pebble beds, the filling quality should be guaranteed against the occurrence of de-mixing or swimming of the larger pebbles over the smaller ones during the thermal transients. A possible solution is to optimise the filling procedure, to improve the PF and its relevant thermal performance, and also to achieve a stable bed lattice during the cycling loads. In this case, the mechanical characteristics of the pebble beds would also be heavily affected, thus requiring a new tests campaign to determine the actual mechanical properties of an “optimised” pebble bed. This paper presents a new filling optimisation method and the experimental results from the compression tests of optimised pebble beds.