(478g) To Advance the Fundamental Understanding of the Hydrodynamics of TRISO Fuel Coaters by Systematically Investigating the Operating Variables Using Optical Probe and Pressure Transducers Techniques

Understanding and scale-up of spouted bed TRISO coaters is fundamental to the success of advanced gas reactors (AGRs) because of their ability to coat low enrichment nuclear fuel particles and the low defect fractions necessary for AGR efficiency and safety. Spouted fluidized beds provide excellent contact between gases and particles making them very useful in many processes for particle coating, granulation, drying, coal gasification, and more. A central stream of gas penetrates the bed of particles creating a spout zone, with an annulus of particles around the spout. Above the spout, a fountain of particles is formed, which fall back to the bed, creating bed circulation. Many different flow characteristics can be observed with only minor changes in operating conditions or column geometry. Unfortunately, the current spouted fluidized bed technology is based on empirical approaches and is operated as a ?black box?. Current research is being conducted to advance the fundamental knowledge and understanding of spouted beds for their proper scale-up and design and for the desired performance. The present work will focus on evaluating the reported dimensionless groups as scaling up factors and to establish a reliable scale-up methodology for TRISO fuel particle spouted bed coaters based on maintaining hydrodynamics similarity via optical probe techniques and pressure transducers.