Natural Convection Heat Transfer Experiments in Fluoride Salt

Abstract

A liquid fluoride salt experiment has been constructed and used to acquire natural convection heat transfer data. The experiment used FLiNaK salt in a small cell that included a cylindrical electrical heater, 1.27 cm in diameter, oriented vertically in a FLiNaK bath. Thermocouples internal to the heater were used, along with FLiNaK temperature measurements and heater power measurements, to determine natural circulation heat transfer coefficients. These data were acquired for Rayleigh numbers ranging from 3 × 105 to 8 × 109 and salt temperatures from 560 °C to 640 °C. Test results show that measured heat transfer coefficients are consistent with conventional natural convection heat transfer coefficients for cylinders, but the average error can be as high as 20% using these correlations. Correlations developed by fitting the data for this experiment show much lower errors (<10%).