Publications Details
Bench-scale screening tests for a boiling sodium-potassium alloy solar receiver
Bench-scale tests were carried out in support of the design of a second-generation 75-kW{sub t} reflux pool-boiler solar receiver. The receiver will be made from Haynes Alloy 230 and will contain the sodium-potassium alloy NaK-78. The bench-scale tests used quartz-lamp-heated boilers to screen candidate boiling-stabilization materials and methods at temperatures up to 750{degree}C. Candidates that provided stable boiling were tested for hot-restart behavior. Poor stability was obtained with single 1/4-inch diameter patches of powdered metal hot-press-sintered onto the wetted side of the heat-input area. Laser-drilled and electric-discharge-machined cavities in the heated surface also performed poorly. Small additions of xenon, and heated-surface tilt out of the vertical dramatically improved poor boiling stability; additions of helium or oxygen did not. The most stable boiling was obtained when the entire heat-input area was covered by a powdered-metal coating. The effect of heated-area size was assessed for one coating: at low incident fluxes, when even this coating performed poorly, increasing the heated-area size markedly improved boiling stability. Good hot-restart behavior was not observed with any candidate, although results were significantly better with added xenon in a boiler shortened from 3 to 2 feet. In addition to the screening tests, flash-radiography imaging of metal-vapor bubbles during boiling was attempted. Contrary to the Cole-Rohsenow correlation, these bubble-size estimates did not vary with pressure; instead they were constant, consistent with the only other alkali metal measurements, but about 1/2 their size.