A molten salt test loop for component and instrumentation testing

Molten salt is an effective coolant for a wide range of applications, including nuclear reactors, concentrated solar power, and other high temperature industrial heat transfer processes. The technical readiness level of components and instrumentation for high-temperature molten salt applications needs improvement for molten salt to be more widely adopted. A molten salt test loop was designed, built, and commissioned as a test bed to address these issues. The molten salt test loop at Abilene Christian University was built out of 316 stainless steel with a forced flow centrifugal-type pump, and was instrumented for remote operation. A low-temperature molten nitrate salt was used in this system, which was designed to operate at temperatures up to 300 ◦C and flow rates up to 90 liters per minute. This paper describes the loop design, computational fluid dynamics modeling, construction, and commissioning details. An outline of the data acquisition and control systems is presented. Salt samples were taken before and after introduction into the loop, and melting points were measured both before and after salt circulation. Performance of the system is discussed as well as improvements required for higher temperature loops envisioned for the future

Prospects of Nanoscience with Nanocrystals

International audienceColloidal nanocrystals (NCs, i.e., crystalline nanoparticles) have become an important class of materials with great potential for applications ranging from medicine to electronic and optoelectronic devices. Todays strong research focus on NCs has been prompted by the tremendous progress in their synthesis. Impressively narrow size distributions of just a few percent, rational shape-engineering, compositional modulation, electronic doping, and tailored surface chemistries are now feasible for a broad range of inorganic compounds. The performance of inorganic NC-based photovoltaic and light-emitting devices has become competitive to other state-of-the-art materials. Semiconductor NCs hold unique promise for near- and mid-infrared technologies, where very few semiconductor materials are available. On a purely fundamental side, new insights into NC growth, chemical transformations, and self-organization can be gained from rapidly progressing in situ characterization and direct imaging techniques. New phenomena are constantly being discovered in the photophysics of NCs and in the electronic properties of NC solids. In this Nano Focus, we review the state of the art in research on colloidal NCs focusing on the most recent works published in the last 2 years