Advanced Structural Materials for Gas-Cooled Fast Reactors—A Review

Structural materials challenges for advanced reactor systems

Key technologies for advanced nuclear systems encompass high temperature structural materials, fast neutron resistant core materials, and specific reactor and power conversion technologies (intermediate heat exchanger, turbo-machinery, high temperature electrolytic or thermo-chemical water splitting processes, etc.). The main requirements for the materials to be used in these reactor systems ar...

High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactors

A Particle-bed Gas-cooled Fast Reactor Core Design for Waste Minimisation

The issue of waste minimisation in advanced reactor systems has been investigated using the Particle-Bed Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (PB-GCFR) design being developed and funded under the U.S. Department of Energy Nuclear Energy Research Initiative (USDOE NERI) Programme. Results indicate that for the given core power density and constraint on the maximum TRU enrichment allowable, the lowest amount ...

Adaptive Polynomial Chaos Techniques for Uncertainty Quantification of a Gas Cooled Fast Reactor Transient

Uncertainty quantification plays an increasingly important role in the nuclear community, especially with the rise of Best Estimate Plus Uncertainty methodologies. Sensitivity analysis, surrogate models, Monte Carlo sampling and several other techniques can be used to propagate input uncertainties. In recent years however polynomial chaos expansion has become a popular alternative providing hig...

Aero-thermal-elasticity-materials Optimization of Cooled Gas Turbine Blades: Part I

The first lecture in this two-lecture sequence provides background and general concepts. The second lecture provides practical examples. The objective of these two lectures is to provide a modular design optimization tool description that will take into account interaction of the hot gas flow-field, heat transfer in the blade material, internal coolant flow-field, stresses and deformations of t...