Heat Transfer Potential of Unidirectional Porous Tubes for Gas Cooling under High Heat Flux Conditions

Kazuhisa Yuki, Risako Kibushi, Ryohei Kubota, Noriyuki Unno, Shigeru Tanaka, Kazuyuki Hokamoto
2022 Energies  
To discuss a suitable porous structure for helium gas cooling under high heat flux conditions of a nuclear fusion divertor, we first evaluate effective thermal conductivity of sintered copper-particles in a simple cubic lattice by direct numerical heat-conduction simulation. The simulation reveals that the effective thermal conductivity of the sintered copper-particle highly depends on the contacting state of each particle, which leads to the difficulty for the thermal design. To cope with this
more » ... difficulty, we newly propose utilization of a unidirectional porous tube formed by explosive compression technology. Quantitative prediction of its cooling potential using the heat transfer correlation equation demonstrates that the heat transfer coefficient of the helium gas cooling at the pressure of 10 MPa exceeds 30,000 W/m2/K at the inlet flow velocity of 25 m/s, which verifies that the unidirectional porous copper tubes can be a candidate for the gas-cooled divertor concept.
doi:10.3390/en15031042 fatcat:pq7wvn3hljauhjuylufrmvfilu