Thermal Design, Basic Equation

Thermal design concerns itself with sizing the equipment to effect the heat transfer necessaiy to cany on the process. The design equation is the familiar one basic to all modes of heat transfer, namely,... 

Convection is heat transfer between portions of a fluid existing under a thermal gradient. The rate of convection heat transfer is often slow for natural or free convection to rapid for forced convection when artificial means are used to mix or agitate the fluid. The basic equation for designing heat exchangers is... 

The fin surface area will not be as effective as the bare tube surface, as the heat has to be conducted along the fin. This is allowed for in design by the use of a fin effectiveness, or fin efficiency, factor. The basic equations describing heat transfer from a fin are derived in Volume 1, Chapter 9 see also Kern (1950). The fin effectiveness is a function of the fin dimensions and the thermal conductivity of the fin material. Fins are therefore usually made from metals with a high thermal conductivity for copper and aluminium the effectiveness will typically be between 0.9 to 0.95. 

Heat and mass transfer constitute fundamentally important transport properties for design of a fluidized catalyst bed. Intense mixing of emulsion phase with a large heat capacity results in uniform temperature at a level determined by the balance between the rates of heat generation from reaction and heat removal through wall heat transfer, and by the heat capacity of feed gas. However, thermal stability of the dilute phase depends also on the heat-diffusive power of the phase (Section IX). The mechanism by which a reactant gas is transferred from the bubble phase to the emulsion phase is part of the basic information needed to formulate the design equation for the bed (Sections VII-IX). These properties are closely related to the flow behavior of the bed (Sections II-V) and to the bubble dynamics. 

TWINKLE is a multidimensional spatial neutron kinetics code, whieh is patterned after steady-state codes currently used for reactor core design. The code uses an implicit finite-difference method to solve the two-group transient neutron diffusion equations in one, two, and three dimensions. The code uses six delayed neutron groups and contains a detailed multi-region fuel-clad-coolant heat transfer model for calculating point-wise Doppler and moderator feedback effects. The code handles up to 2000 spatial points and performs its own steady-state initialisation. Aside from basic cross-section data and thermal-hydraulic parameters, the code accepts as input basic driving functions, such as inlet temperature, pressure, flow, boron concentration, control rod motion, and others. Various edits are provided (for example, channel-wise power, axial offset, enthalpy, volumetric surge, point-wise power, and fuel temperatures). 

This experiment is designed to acquaint the participant with the use of the danger coefficient method to measure the absorption cross sections of certain elements. The experiment consists of a measurement of the sensitivity of the AGN-201 reactor at the core center with a standard l/v-absorber and subsequent cross-section measurements of a selected group of materials in terms of the reactor sensitivity. Reactivity will be determined by measurement of positive periods with and without the material in the reactor core. The excess reactivity of the supercritical reactor is related directly to the positive period measurement through the basic inhour equation. The results of the experiment will be compared with the known thermal cross sections and a complete analysis of any discrepancies will be made. 

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