Abstract
The determination of the thermal conductivity of breeder materials is one of the main goal in order to find the best candidate material for the fusion reactor technology.Experimental tests have been and will be carried out with a dedicated experimental devices, built at the Department of Civil and Industrial Engineering of the University of Pisa. The methodological approach used in doing that is characterized by two main phases strictly interrelated each other: the first one focused on the experimental evaluation of thermal conductivity of a ceramic material, by means of hot wire method, to be subsequently used in the second phase, based on the test rig method, to determine the thermal conductivity of pebble bed material. To the purpose, two different experimental devices have been designed and built. This paper deals with the first phase of the methodology.In this framework, the equipment set up and built to perform Hot wire tests, the ceramic material (a cylinder of alumina), the experimental procedure and the measured results obtained varying the temperature, are presented and discussed. The experimental campaign has been lead from 50°C up to 400°C.The thermal conductivity of the ceramic material at different bulk temperatures has been obtained in stationary conditions (detected on the basis of the temperature values measured during the experiment). Numerical analyses have been also performed by means of FEM code Ansys©. The numerical results were in quite good agreement with the experimental one, confirming also the reliability of code in reproducing heat transfer phenomena.
Highlights
The knowledge of the effective thermal conductivity of pebble beds, to be used as breeder material in fusion reactor, is of meaningful important to extract thermal power, as it is widely known in the scientific literature [1]-[7]
Hot Wire Method (HWM): description of experimental device The experimental equipment, consists of the following main parts: the furnace; the cylinder of alumina, which was composed of three cylinders in series as shown in Figure 2; the thermal resistance; the Fan-Inverter system and the Data Acquisition System (DAS)
Analysing the λA behaviour, it is possible to observe that the conductivity decreases along with the increase of the test temperature; the calculated maximum deviation resulted about 1.3%
Summary
This content has been downloaded from IOPscience. Please scroll down to see the full text. Ser. 547 012037 (http://iopscience.iop.org/1742-6596/547/1/012037) View the table of contents for this issue, or go to the journal homepage for more. Download details: IP Address: 131.114.180.200 This content was downloaded on 28/11/2014 at 11:32 Please note that terms and conditions apply
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