Recently, the professinoal research team of Jie Yu/ Zhibin Chen, Institute of Nuclear Energy Safety Technology, Hefei Institutes of Physical Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, has made a new progress in researching physical properties of working fluids in space reactor nuclear power generation system. The research paper "Influence of non-ideal gas characteristics on working fluid properties and thermal cycle of space nuclear power generation system" has been published in the International Authoritative Journal "Energy". Chi Xu is the first author, Dali Yu and Jie Yu are corresponding authors.

Space nuclear Closed Brayton Cycle (CBC) power generation system with Helium-xenon gas (He-Xe) as a working fluid has attracted much attention with space technology development，the establishment of appropriate thermophysical property model of He-Xe is the key to achieve a high-precision simulation of space nuclear CBC power generation system. The non-ideal gas thermophysical property model based on the virial coefficient was developed and compared with the common ideal gas model of He-Xe gas，the results show that He-Xe physical parameters deviated from ideal gas characteristics significantly under different working conditions, which verifies the importance and necessity of treating He-Xe gas as the non-ideal gas.

 

Figure 1. Space nuclear power generation system

Figure 2. Verification of the non-ideal gas properties computational model

The article link：https://doi.org/10.1016/j.energy.2021.119881