Advancing radiative heat transfer modeling in high-temperature liquid-salts

Nuclear and solar-thermal communities are investigating the use of high Prandtl number liquid-salts in energy generation systems, including fluoride salt-cooled high-temperature reactors (FHRs), molten salt reactors (MSRs), fusion devices, and concentrated solar power plants. The temperature distribution in the coolant salts can be affected by participating media radiative heat transfer, due to the high temperature operation and their semitransparent nature. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) becomes a valuable tool to model the complex 3-dimensional nature of the heat transfer, especially in regions where temperature-dependent material corrosion drives the need for accurate local temperature predictions. Correctly modeling radiative heat transfer in CFD requires well-characterized liquid-salt optical properties, which are not yet known. Additionally, current CFD approaches can become computationally too expensive for practical use when spectral effects need to be resolved.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Nuclear Science and Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Coyle, Carolyn Patricia.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Charles Forsberg and Emilio Baglietto.

• Nuclear Science and Engineering.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129113

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129113