Peter's instinct about liquid tin as a heat transfer medium is well founded, but in the context of the Hot cat reactor architecture as it currently stands, the integration of the current Hot cat with the well known and mature heat pipe technology is a better engineering solution.
A heat pipe is a amazing and highly efficient heat-transfer device that combines the principles of both thermal conductivity of liquid metal with its phase transition to efficiently manage the transfer of heat between two solid interfaces. At the hot interface of a heat pipe, a liquid metal in contact with a thermally conductive solid surface turns into a vapor by absorbing heat from that surface. The vapor then travels along the heat pipe at supersonic speeds to the cold interface and condenses back into a liquid that releases the latent heat. The liquid then returns to the hot interface through either capillary action of a patterned inner surface of the pipe to repeat in a continual cycle. Due to the very high heat transfer coefficients for boiling and condensation, heat pipes are highly effective thermal conductors. The effective thermal conductivity varies with heat pipe length, and can approach 100 kW/(cm2) for long heat pipes which is 200 times more powerful in comparison with copper. Using the heat pipe concept, the Hot-Cat industrial plant could be designed to function in a completely passive mode without any moving parts or computers. The key to this design is to use a small diameter lithium moly or zirconium heat pipe (2cm) to remove high temperature heat from the reactor core. A lithium heat pipe operates in the heat range between 900C and 1700C. This powerful implimentation of the heat pipe has a heat transfer capability many thousands of times grater than boiling water. In detail, the heat transfer capacity moves heat at 125 kilowatts per square centimeter of surface area. Such heat transfer power could literally cool the surface of the Sun. Unlike Rossi's system, such a system would operate as an sealed isolated unit in a vacuum with the core of the Hot cat at ambient pressure. How to select the right heat pipe for a given application. https://www.enertron-inc.com/pdf/thermal_design_guildines/How-to-select-a-heat-pipe.pdf A CO2 turbine generator the size of a bread box could be integrated into the heat pipe Hot cat to generate electric power. Alternatively, a closed cycle liquid metal magnetohydrodynamic generator (MHD generator) could do the job without any moving parts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetohydrodynamic_generator Rossi will face devastating competition from advanced power plant designs when the mystery of the Hot-Cat core is resolved. On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 11:35 AM, Peter Gluck <[email protected]> wrote: > Dear Friends, > > I hope you will like this: > > > http://egooutpeters.blogspot.ro/2015/02/lenr-initiatives-present-and-future.html > > not only because it is a bit shorter than usual. > > Please send me DIKW's- you have access to and I not! > Thanks! > Peter > > > -- > Dr. Peter Gluck > Cluj, Romania > http://egooutpeters.blogspot.com >
