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Operations & Power
Members focus on the dissemination of knowledge and information in the area of power reactors with particular application to the production of electric power and process heat. The division sponsors meetings on the coverage of applied nuclear science and engineering as related to power plants, non-power reactors, and other nuclear facilities. It encourages and assists with the dissemination of knowledge pertinent to the safe and efficient operation of nuclear facilities through professional staff development, information exchange, and supporting the generation of viable solutions to current issues.
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2024 ANS Annual Conference
June 16–19, 2024
Las Vegas, NV|Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino
Standards Program
The Standards Committee is responsible for the development and maintenance of voluntary consensus standards that address the design, analysis, and operation of components, systems, and facilities related to the application of nuclear science and technology. Find out What’s New, check out the Standards Store, or Get Involved today!
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Latest News
Proving DRACO will deliver
The United States is now closer than it has been in over five decades to launching the first nuclear thermal rocket into space, thanks to DRACO—the Demonstration Rocket for Agile Cislunar Orbit.
Sheng Zhang, Xiaodong Sun
Nuclear Technology | Volume 206 | Number 11 | November 2020 | Pages 1721-1739
Technical Paper | doi.org/10.1080/00295450.2020.1749481
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Molten salts have been proposed as heat transfer media due to their superior thermal performance at elevated temperatures. A number of heat transfer correlations have been proposed in the literature for molten salts without explicitly considering the radiative heat transfer effect in the salts, which may not be negligible. This study therefore attempts to (1) quantitatively analyze the convective and radiative heat transfer of molten salts using an overall heat transfer model that includes a radiative heat transfer model developed in this research and an existing conventional convective heat transfer model/correlation, such as the Sieder-Tate or Hausen correlation, and (2) provide rationale on under what conditions it is necessary to consider the radiative heat transfer effect in salts. A parametric study was performed using the radiative heat transfer model developed to investigate the effects of various input variables, including the tube size (inner diameter 5 to 50 mm), salt temperature (500°C to 1000°C), salt and wall temperature difference (5°C to 100°C), and salt absorption coefficient (1 to 100 m-1). Our study indicates that (1) the proposed overall heat transfer model reasonably predicts the salt convective and radiative heat transfer, (2) the radiative heat transfer is more important for laminar flows than transitional and turbulent flows, (3) the radiative heat transfer is more important in tubes of larger inner diameter, (4) the salt temperature affects the radiative heat transfer significantly while the temperature difference between the salt and wall has a slightly smaller effect for the range investigated (ΔT = 5°C to 100°C), and (5) the salt absorption coefficient significantly affects the salt radiative heat transfer.