NuEST has undertaken several projects with national lab partners and other academic institutions to investigate Thermal-fluidic problems in advanced gas-cooled reactors. These problems include- Understanding Depressurized Loss of Forced Circulation and Air ingress; Pressurized Conduction Cooldown and effect of thermal contact conductance/radiative Heat transfer; Passive Safety of microHTGRs or mobile microreactors.

Liquid metal-cooled reactors have unique advantages relevant to reactor safety: low volatile coolant, strong natural circulation, and high thermal conductivity. But there are some fundamental differences in the thermal-fluidic behavior. Attributed to thermal stratification, significantly different scalar turbulence impacts thermal fluctuations and turbulent Prandtl numbers. Although these physical effects are mostly due to the low Prandtl number of these fluids, the mechanisms are not well understood. NuEST Lab has developed a gallium-based thermal fluidic system that is pumped using a magnetic field. To study some of these phenomena for better design and optimization of next-generation fission and fusion reactor cooling systems.

The serious economic challenge faced by the existing NPPs is their inability to follow grid load demand. Due to this reason, they are economically less competitive as compared to their fossil counterparts, which can supply peak loads and thus generate far more revenue during those peak hours. The technical challenge behind this economic disposition is that reactor power cannot be allowed to follow the grid and fluctuate in order to avoid unsafe conditions inside the reactor. Thus, the only way NPPs can accommodate grid demand is if the reactor thermal power or plant electrical power is stored in an integrated device when in surplus. We develop methods to store exergetically efficient thermal energy storage devices. The novel design of these methods is based on manipulating thermal anisotropies in materials at the micro- or macroscale. Our team has also developed a novel algorithm based on stochastic emulators to design components for nuclear-renewable microgrids.