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A review of recent study on the characteristics and applications of pebble flows in nuclear engineering

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Abstract

This paper reviews the recent three-year progress on the investigations of pebble bed flows in nuclear engineering. Both the application of pebble beds in the fission reactors and the fusion reactors are included. The fundamental characteristics of packing, flows, conduction, convection, radiation, and the effective thermal conductivity of pebble beds are reviewed. The important issues on the design of the pebble beds as well as that related to the reactor safety are also introduced. In addition, the advances in measurement techniques and numerical coupled methods for exploring the pebble flow characteristics are categorized and summarized too.

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Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful for the support of this research by the National Science and Technology Major Project (Grant No. 2011ZX06901-003), and Funds of Nuclear Power Technology Innovation Centre (Grant Nos. HDLCXZX-2020-HD-022 and HDLCXZX-2021-ZH-024).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Nuclear and New Energy Technology, Collaborative Innovation Center of Advanced Nuclear Energy Technology, Key Laboratory of Advanced Reactor Engineering and Safety, Ministry of Education, Tsinghua University, Beijing, 100084, China

    Nan Gui, Shengyao Jiang, Xingtuan Yang & Jiyuan Tu

  2. School of Engineering, RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, 3083, Australia

    Jiyuan Tu

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  1. Nan Gui
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  2. Shengyao Jiang
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Correspondence to Shengyao Jiang.

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Gui, N., Jiang, S., Yang, X. et al. A review of recent study on the characteristics and applications of pebble flows in nuclear engineering. Exp. Comput. Multiph. Flow 4, 339–349 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42757-022-0140-z

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42757-022-0140-z

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