Mark your calendar to join us for the Heat Lab’s upcoming Thermal Science Seminar. We will have a presentation from Sam Musa on Wednesday, March 15th from 4:30PM – 5:30PM in the MRDC Room 3515. Also, everyone is encouraged to join us at Rocky Mountain Pizza after the seminar from 6:00PM—7:00PM; come network, enjoy pizza and engage in thermal discussions!

ABSTRACT

"Reversed Heat Flux Study of Impinging-Jet Water Cooling for Helium-Cooled Finger-Type Divertors" Experimental evaluation of the thermal-hydraulic characteristics of helium-cooled divertor concepts is important in developing commercial magnetic fusion energy (MFE). Achieving prototypical steady-state incident heat fluxes of 10 MW/m2 in a lab-scale remains a major challenge. As an alternative to heating the test section, this work presents an initial assessment of a “reversed heat flux approach”, pioneered by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), that cools the test modules (instead of heating them) with water to determine the heat transfer coefficients (HTC).

The objectives of this design study are to:  1) determine whether such a reversed heat flux approach can be used to experimentally study the thermal-hydraulic performance of helium-cooled divertor concepts, and 2) determine the design and operational parameters for a small-scale submerged water jet impingement cooling facility suitable for validating these numerical predictions. Numerical simulations were performed suggesting that a submerged single-phase impinging water jet at (300 K, 1 MPa) and  = 3.5 kg/s can remove heat fluxes as great as 7.5 MW/m2 over a 2 cm diameter area and a water cooling facility to accompany the current GT helium loop was designed based on these predictions.