Publications

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The mission of the Energy Conversion (EC) area of the Advanced Reactor Technology (ART) program is to commercialize the sCO₂ Brayton cycle for Advance Reactors and for the Supercritical Transformational Electric Production (STEP) program. The near-term objective of the EC team efforts is to support the development of a commercially scalable Recompression Closed Brayton Cycle (RCBC) to be constructed for the first STEP demonstration system with the lowest risk possible. This document details the status of technology, policy and market considerations, documentation of gaps and needs, and outlines the steps necessary for the successful development and deployment of commercial sCO₂ Brayton Power Systems along the path to nuclear reactor applications.

The purpose of the ART Energy Conversion (EC) Project is to provide solutions to convert the heat from an advanced reactor to useful products that support commercial application of the reactor designs.

Over the past ten years, the Department of Energy (DOE) has helped to develop components and technologies for the Supercritical Carbon Dioxide (sCO₂) power cycle capable of efficient operation at high temperatures and high efficiency. The DOE Offices of Fossil Energy, Nuclear Energy, and Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy collaborated in the planning and execution of the sCO₂ Power Cycle Summit conducted in Albuquerque, NM in November 2017. The summit brought together participants from government, national laboratories, research, and industry to engage in discussions regarding the future of sCO₂ Power Cycles Technology. This report summarizes the work involved in summit planning and execution, before, during, and after the event, including the coordination between three DOE offices and technical content presented at the event.

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The near-term objective of the EC team is to establish an operating, commercially scalable Recompression Closed Brayton Cycle (RCBC) to be constructed for the NE - STEP demonstration system (demo) with the lowest risk possible. A systems engineering approach is recommended to ensure adequate requirements gathering, documentation, and mode ling that supports technology development relevant to advanced reactors while supporting crosscut interests in potential applications. A holistic systems engineering model was designed for the ART Energy Conversion program by leveraging Concurrent Engineering, Balance Model, Simplified V Model, and Project Management principles. The resulting model supports the identification and validation of lifecycle Brayton systems requirements, and allows designers to detail system-specific components relevant to the current stage in the lifecycle, while maintaining a holistic view of all system elements.

The supercritical carbon dioxide (S - CO2) Brayton Cycle has gained significant attention in the last decade as an advanced power cycle capab le of achieving high efficiency power conversion. Sandia National Laboratories, with support from the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Nuclear Energy (US DOE - NE), has been conducting research and development in order to deliver a technology that is rea dy for commercialization. There are a wide range of materials related challenges that must be overcome for the success of this technology. At Sandia, recent work has focused on the following main areas: (1) Investigating the potential for system cost re duction through the introduction of low cost alloys in low temperature loop sections, (2) Identifying material options for 10MW RCBC systems, (3) Understanding and resolving turbine degradation, (4) Identifying gas foil bearing behavior in CO 2 , and (5) Ide ntifying the influence of gas chemistry on alloy corrosion. Progress in each of these areas is provided in this report.

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Sandia National Laboratories and General Atomics are pleased to respond to the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-e)’s request for information on innovative developments that may overcome various current reactor-technology limitations. The RFI is particularly interested in innovations that enable ultra-safe and secure modular nuclear energy systems. Our response addresses the specific features for reactor designs called out in the RFI, including a brief assessment of the current state of the technologies that would enable each feature and the methods by which they could be best incorporated into a reactor design.

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At Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), The Nuclear Energy Systems Laboratory / Brayton Lab has been established to research and develop subsystems and demonstrate the viability of the closed Brayton cycles (CBC), and in particular, the recompression CBC. The ultimate objective of this program is to have a commercial-ready system available for small modular reactors. For this objective, R&D efforts must demonstrate that, among other things, component and the system behavior is understood and control is manageable, and system performance is predictable. Research activities that address these needs include investigating system responses to various anticipated perturbations, and demonstrating that component and system performance is understood. To these ends, this paper presents system response to a perturbation, and turbomachinery performance results during steady state operation. A long duration test, with an extensive period at steady state, was completed in the simple CBC configuration. During this period, a cooling perturbation was initiated. Data from this test are presented and evaluated to explain the sequence of events following the perturbation. It was found that a cascading series of events ensued, starting with the fluid condensing effect of the cooling perturbation. The explanation of events emphasizes the highly interactive and nonlinear nature of CBC's. The comparisons of measured and predicted turbomachinery performance yielded excellent results and give confidence that the predictive methods originally envisioned for this system work well.

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