Principal Investigator Jacopo Buongiorno
Since the primary costs in nuclear or solar power systems are in the plant hardware, it is imperative that the heat-to-electricity conversion occurs with high efficiency in these systems. This requirement favors the use of a high-temperature heat transfer medium, and in the case of solar power, also a high-temperature storage medium.
Molten salts are promising heat transfer and storage media, due to their high thermal capacity and relative chemical inertness at high temperatures, up to 1000°C. At such high temperatures, thermal radiation transport within the molten salts, which are semi-transparent media, becomes very significant, and must be accounted for in the thermal analysis of the system. Therefore, in the process of developing molten salt media for advanced high-temperature nuclear and solar energy applications, we are measuring the attenuation of light (from IR to UV) within various molten salts, e.g., chloride salts like NaCl-KCl and carbonate salts like Li2CO3-Na2CO3-K2CO3.