Pebblebed NTRs: Solid Fuel, but Different

Hello, and welcome back to Beyond NERVA!

Today, we’re going to take a break from the closed cycle gas core nuclear thermal rocket (which I’ve been working on constantly since mid-January) to look at one of the most popular designs in modern NTR history: the pebblebed reactor!

This I should have covered between solid and liquid fueled NTRs, honestly, and there’s even a couple types of reactor which MAY be able to be used for NTR between as well – the fluidized and shush fuel reactors – but with the lack of information on liquid fueled reactors online I got a bit zealous.

Beads to Explore the Solar System

Most of the solid fueled NTRs we’ve looked at have been either part of, or heavily influenced by, the Rover and NERVA programs in the US. These types of reactors, also called “prismatic fuel reactors,” use a solid block of fuel of some form, usually tileable, with holes drilled through each fuel element.

The other designs we’ve covered fall into one of two categories, either a bundled fuel element, such as the Russian RD-0410, or a folded flow disc design such as the Dumbo or Tricarbide Disc NTRs.

However, there’s another option which is far more popular for modern American high temperature gas cooled reactor designs: the pebblebed reactor. This is a clever design, which increases the surface area of the fuel by using many small, spherical fuel elements held in a (usually) unfueled structure. The coolant/propellant passes between these beads, picking up the heat as it passes between them.

This has a number of fundamental advantages over the prismatic style fuel elements:

  1. The surface area of the fuel is so much greater than with simple holes drilled in the prismatic fuel elements, increasing thermal transfer efficiency.
  2. Since all types of fuel swell when heated, the density of the packed fuel elements could be adjusted to allow for better thermal expansion behavior within the active region of the reactor.
  3. The fuel elements themselves were reasonably loosely contained within separate structures, allowing for higher temperature containment materials to be used.
  4. The individual elements could be made smaller, allowing for a lower temperature gradient from the inside to the outside of a fuel, reducing the overall thermal stress on each fuel pebble.
  5. In a folded flow design, it was possible to not even have a physical structure along the inside of the annulus if centrifugal force was applied to the fuel element structure (as we saw in the fluid fueled reactor designs), eliminating the need for as many super-high temperature materials in the highest temperature region of the reactor.
  6. Because each bead is individually clad, in the case of an accident during launch, even if the reactor core is breached and a fuel release into the environment occurs, the release of either any radiological components or any other fuel materials into the environment is minimized
  7. Because each bead is relatively small, it is less likely that they will sustain sufficient damage either during mechanical failure of the flight vehicle or impact with the ground that would breach the cladding.

However, there is a complication with this design type as well, since there are many (usually hundreds, sometimes thousands) of individual fuel elements:

  1. Large numbers of fuel beads mean large numbers of fuel beads to manufacture and perform quality control checks on.
  2. Each bead will need to be individually clad, sometimes with multiple barriers for fission product release, hydrogen corrosion, and the like.
  3. While each fuel bead will be individually clad, and so the loss of one or all the fuel will not significantly impact the environment from a radiological perspective in the case of an accident, there is potential for significant geographic dispersal of the fuel in the event of a failure-to-orbit or other accident.

There are a number of different possible flow paths through the fuel elements, but the two most common are either an axial flow, where the propellant passes through a tubular structure packed with the fuel elements, and a folded flow design, where the fuel is in a porous annular structure, with the coolant (usually) passing from the outside of the annulus, through the fuel, and the now-heated coolant exiting through the central void of the annulus. We’ll call these direct flow and folded flow pebblebed fuel elements.

In addition, there are many different possible fuel types, which regulars of this blog will be familiar with by now: oxides, carbides, nitrides, and CERMET are all possible in a pebblebed design, and if differential fissile fuel loading is needed, or gradients in fuel composition (such as using tungsten CERMET in higher temperature portions of the reactor, with beryllium or molybdenum CERMET in lower temperature sections), this can be achieved using individual, internally homogeneous fuel types in the beads, which can be loaded into the fuel support structure at the appropriate time to create the desired gradient.

Just like in “regular” fuel elements, these pebbles need to be clad in a protective coating. There have been many proposals over the years, obviously depending on what type of fissile fuel matrix the fuel uses to ensure thermal expansion and chemical compatibility with the fuel and coolant. Often, multiple layers of different materials are used to ensure structural and chemical integrity of the fuel pellets. Perhaps the best known example of this today is the TRISO fuel element, used in the US Advanced Gas Reactor fuel development program. The TRI-Structural ISOtropic fuel element uses either oxide or carbide fuel in the center, followed by a porous carbon layer, a pyrolitic carbon layer (sort of like graphite, but with some covalent bonds between the carbon sheets), followed by a silicon carbide outer shell for mechanical and fission product retention. Some variations include a burnable poison for reactivity control (the QUADRISO at Argonne), or use different outer layer materials for chemical protection. Several types have been suggested for NTR designs, and we’ll see more of them later.

The (sort of) final significant variable is the size of the pebble. As the pebbles go down in size, the available surface area of the fuel-to-coolant interface increases, but also the amount of available space between the pebbles decreases and the path that the coolant flows through becomes more resistant to higher coolant flow rates. Depending on the operating temperature and pressure, the thermal gradient acceptable in the fuel, the amount of decay heat that you want to have to deal with on shutdown (the bigger the fuel pebble, the more time it will take to cool down), fissile fuel density, clad thickness requirements, and other variables, a final size for the fuel pebbles can be calculated, and will vary to a certain degree between different reactor designs.

Not Just for NTRs: The Electricity Generation Potential of Pebblebed Reactors

Obviously, the majority of the designs for pebblebed reactors are not meant to ever fly in space, they’re mostly meant to operate as high temperature gas cooled reactors on Earth. This type of architecture has been proposed for astronuclear designs as well, although that isn’t the focus of this video.

Furthermore, the pebblebed design lends itself to other cooling methods, such as molten salt, liquid metal, and other heat-carrying fluids, which like the gas would flow through the fuel pellets, pick up the heat produced by the fissioning fuel, and carry it into a power conversion system of whatever design the reactor has integrated into its systems.

Finally, while it’s rare, pebblebed designs were popular for a while with radioisotope power systems. There are a number of reasons for this beyond being able to run a liquid coolant through the fuel (which was done on one occasion that I can think of, and we’ll cover in a future post): in an alpha-emitting radioisotope, such as 238Pu, over time the fuel will generate helium gas – the alpha particles will slow, stop, and become doubly ionized helium nuclei, which will then strip electrons off whatever materials are around and become normal 4He. This gas needs SOMEWHERE to go, which is why just like with a fissile fuel structure there are gas management mechanisms used in radioisotope power source fuel assemblies such as areas of vacuum, pressure relief valves, and the like. In some types of RTG, such as the SNAP-27 RTG used by Apollo, as well as the Multi-Hundred Watt RTG used by Voyager, the fuel was made into spheres, with the gaps in between the spheres (normally used to pass coolant through) are used for the gas expansion volume.

We’ll discuss these ideas more in the future, but I figured it was important to point out here. Let’s get back to the NTRs, and the first (and only major) NTR program to focus on the pebblebed concept: the Project Timberwind and the Space Nuclear Propulsion Program in the 1980s and early 1990s.

The Beginnings of Pebblebed NTRs

The first proposals for a gas cooled pebblebed reactor were from 1944/45, although they were never pursued beyond the concept stage, and a proposal for the “Space Vehicle Propulsion Reactor” was made by Levoy and Newgard at Thikol in 1960, with again no further development. If you can get that paper, I’d love to read it, here’s all I’ve got: “Aero/Space Engineering 19, no. 4, pgs 54-58, April 1960” and ‘AAE Journal, 68, no. 6, pgs. 46-50, June 1960,” and “Engineering 189, pg 755, June 3, 1960.” Sounds like they pushed hard, and for good reason, but at the time a pebblebed reactor was a radical concept for a terrestrial reactor, and getting a prismatic fueled reactor, something far more familiar to nuclear engineers, was a challenge that seemed far simpler and more familiar.

Sadly, while this design may end up have informed the design of its contemporary reactor, it seems like this proposal was never pursued.

Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor (“Hatch” Reactor) and the Groundwork for Timberwind

Another proposal was made at the same time at Brookhaven National Laboratory, by L.P. Hatch, W.H. Regan, and a name that will continue to come up for the rest of this series, John R. Powell (sorry, can’t find the given names of the other two, even). This relied on very small (100-500 micrometer) fuel, held in a perforated drum to contain the fuel but also allow propellant to be injected into the fuel particles, which was spun at a high rate to provide centrifugal force to the particles and prevent them from escaping.

Now, fluidized beds need a bit of explanation, which I figured was best to put in here since this is not a generalized property of pebblebed reactors. In this reactor (and some others) the pebbles are quite small, and the coolant flow can be quite high. This means that it’s possible – and sometimes desirable – for the pebbles to move through the active zone of the reactor! This type of mobile fuel is called a “fluidized bed” reactor, and comes in several variants, including pebble (solid spheres), slurry (solid particulate suspended in a liquid), and colloid (solid particulate suspended in a gas). The best way to describe the phenomenon is with what is called the point of minimum fluidization, or when the drag forces on the mass of the solid objects from the fluid flow balances with the weight of the bed (keep in mind that life is a specialized form of drag). There’s a number of reasons to do this – in fact, many chemical reactions using a solid and a fluid component use fluidization to ensure maximum mixing of the components. In the case of an NTR, the concern is more to do with achieving as close to thermal equilibrium between the solid fuel and the gaseous propellant as possible, while minimizing the pressure drop between the cold propellant inlet and the hot propellant outlet. For an NTR, the way that the “weight” is applied is through centrifugal force on the fuel. This is a familiar concept to those that read my liquid fueled NTR series, but actually began with the fluidized bed concept.

This is calculated using two different relations between the same variables: the Reynolds number (Re), which determines how turbulent fluid flow is, and the friction coefficient (CD, or coefficient of drag, which deptermines how much force acts on the fuel particles based on fluid interactions with the particles) which can be found plotted below. The plotted lines represent either the Reynolds number or the void fraction ε, which represents the amount of gas present in the volume defined by the presence of fuel particles.

Hendrie 1970

If you don’t follow the technical details of the relationships depicted, that’s more than OK! Basically, the y axis is proportional to the gas turbulence, while the x axis is proportional to the particle diameter, so you can see that for relatively small increases in particle size you can get larger increases in propellant flow rates.

The next proposal for a pebble bed reactor grew directly out of the Hatch reactor, the Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor for Space Nuclear Propulsion (RBR). From the documentation I’ve been able to find, from the original proposal work continued at a very low level at BNL from the time of the original proposal until 1973, but the only reports I’ve been able to find are from 1971-73 under the RBR name. A rotating fuel structure, with small, 100-500 micrometer spherical particles of uranium-zirconium carbide fuel (the ZrC forming the outer clad and a maximum U content of 10% to maximize thermal limits of the fuel particles), was surrounded by a reflector of either metallic beryllium or BeO (which was preferred as a moderator, but the increased density also increased both reactor mass and manufacturing requirements). Four drums in the reflector would control the reactivity of the engine, and an electric motor would be attached to a porous “squirrel cage” frit, which would rotate to contain the fuel.

Much discussion was had as to the form of uranium used, be it 235U or 233U. In the 235U reactor, the reactor had a cavity length of 25 in (63.5 cm), an inner diameter of 25 in (63.5 cm), and a fuel bed depth when fluidized of 4 in (10.2 cm), with a critical mass of U-ZrC being achieved at 343.5 lbs (155.8 kg) with 9.5% U content. The 233U reactor was smaller, at 23 in (56 cm) cavity length, 20 in (51 cm) bed inner diameter, 3 in (7.62 cm) deep fuel bed with a higher (70%) void fraction, and only 105.6 lbs (47.9 kg) of U-ZrC fuel at a lower (and therefore more temperature-tolerant) 7.5% U loading.

233U was the much preferred fuel in this reactor, with two options being available to the designers: either the decreased fuel loading could be used to form the smaller, higher thrust-to-weight ratio engine described above, or the reactor could remain at the dimensions of the 235U-fueled option, but the temperature could be increased to improve the specific impulse of the engine.

There was als a trade-off between the size of the fuel particles and the thermal efficiency of the reactor,:

  • Smaller particles advantages
    • Higher surface area, and therefore better thermal transfer capabilities,
    • Smaller radius reduces thermal stresses on fuel
  • Smaller particles disadvantages
    • Fluidized particle bed fuel loss would be a more immediate concern
    • More sensitive to fluid dynamic behavior in the bed
    • Bubbles could more easily form in fuel
    • Higher centrifugal force required for fuel containment
  • Larger particle advantages
    • Ease of manufacture
    • Lower centrifugal force requirements for a given propellant flow rate
  • Larger particle disadvantages
    • Higher thermal gradient and stresses in fuel pellets
    • Less surface area, so lower thermal transfer efficiency

It would require testing to determine the best fuel particle size, which could largely be done through cold flow testing.

These studies looked at cold flow testing in depth. While this is something that I’ve usually skipped over in my reporting on NTR development, it’s a crucial type of testing in any gas cooled reactor, and even more so in a fluidized bed NTR, so let’s take a look at what it’s like in a pebblebed reactor: the equipment, the data collection, and how the data modified the reactor design over time.

Cold flow testing is usually the predecessor to electrically heated flow testing in an NTR. These tests determine a number of things, including areas within the reactor that may end up with stagnant propellant (not a good thing), undesired turbulence, and other negative consequences to the flow of gas through the reactor. They are preliminary tests, since as the propellant heats up while going through the reactor, a couple major things will change: first, the density of the gas will decrease and second, as the density changes the Reynolds number (a measure of self-interaction, viscosity, and turbulent vs laminar flow behavior) will change.

In this case, the cold flow tests were especially useful, since one of the biggest considerations in this reactor type is how the gas and fuel interact.

The first consideration that needed to be examined is the pressure drop across the fuel bed – the highest pressure point in the system is always the turbopump, and the pressure will decrease from that point throughout the system due to friction with the pipes carrying propellant, heating effects, and a host of other inefficiencies. One of the biggest questions initially in this design was how much pressure would be lost from the frit (the outer containment structure and propellant injection system into the fuel) to the central void in the body of the fuel, where it exits the nozzle. Happily, this pressure drop is minimal: according to initial testing in the early 1960s (more on that below), the pressure drop was equal to the weight of the fuel bed.

The next consideration was the range between fluidizing the fuel and losing the fuel through literally blowing it out the nozzle – otherwise known as entrainment, a problem we looked at extensively on a per-molecule basis in the liquid fueled NTR posts (since that was the major problem with all those designs). Initial calculations and some basic experiments were able to map the propellant flow rate and centrifugal force required to both get the benefit of a fluidized bed and prevent fuel loss.

Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor testbed test showing bubble formation,

Another concern is the formation of bubbles in the fuel body. As we covered in the bubbler LNTR post (which you can find here), bubbles are a problem in any fuel type, but in a fluid fueled reactor with coolant passing through it there’s special challenges. In this case, the main method of transferring heat from the fuel to the propellant is convection (i.e. contact between the fuel and the propellant causing vortices in the gas which distributes the heat), so an area that doesn’t have any (or minimal) fuel particles in it will not get heated as thoroughly. That’s a headache not only because the overall propellant temperature drops (proportional to the size of the bubbles), but it also changes the power distribution in the reactor (the bubbles are fission blank spots).

Finally, the initial experiment set looked at the particle-to-fluid thermal transfer coefficients. These tests were far from ideal, using a 1 g system rather than the much higher planned centrifugal forces, but they did give some initial numbers.

The first round of tests was done at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) from 1962 to 1966, using a relatively simple test facility. A small, 10” (25.4 cm) length by 1” (2.54 cm) diameter centrifuge was installed, with gas pressure provided by a pressurized liquefied air system. 138 to 3450 grams of glass particles were loaded into the centrifuge, and various rotational velocities and gas pressures were used to test the basic behavior of the particles under both centrifugal force and gas pressure. While some bobbles were observed, the fuel beds remained stable and no fuel particles were lost during testing, a promising beginning.

These tests provided not just initial thermal transfer estimates, pressure drop calculations, and fuel bed behavioral information, but also informed the design of a new, larger test rig, this one 10 in by 10 in (25.4 by 25.4 cm), which was begun in 1966. This system would not only have a larger centrifuge, but would also use liquid nitrogen rather than liquefied air, be able to test different fuel particle simulants rather than just relatively lightweight glass, and provide much more detailed data. Sadly, the program ran out of funding later that year, and the partially completed test rig was mothballed.

Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor (RBR): New Life for the Hatch Reactor

It would take until 1970, when the Space Nuclear Systems office of the Atomic Energy Commission and NASA provided additional funding to complete the test stand and conduct a series of experiments on particle behavior, reactor dynamics and optimization, and other analytical studies of a potential advanced pebblebed NTR.

The First Year: June 1970-June 1971

After completing the test stand, the team at BNL began a series of tests with this larger, more capable equipment in Building 835. The first, most obvious difference is the diameter of the centrifuge, which was upgraded from 1 inch to 10 inches (25.4 cm), allowing for a more prototypical fuel bed depth. This was made out of perforated aluminum, held in a stainless steel pressure housing for feeding the pressurized gas through the fuel bed. In addition, the gas system was changed from the pressurized air system to one designed to operate on nitrogen, which was stored in liquid form in trailers outside the building for ease of refilling (and safety), then pre-vaporized and held in two other, high-pressure trailers.

Photographs were used to record fluidization behavior, taken viewing the bottom of the bed from underneath the apparatus. While initially photos were only able to be taken 5 seconds apart, later upgrades would improve this over the course of the program.

The other major piece of instrumentation surrounded the pressure and flow rate of the nitrogen gas throughout the system. The gas was introduced at a known pressure through two inlets into the primary steel body of the test stand, with measurements of upstream pressure, cylindrical cavity pressure outside the frit, and finally a pitot tube to measure pressure inside the central void of the centrifuge.

Three main areas of pressure drop were of interest: due to the perforated frit itself, the passage of the gas through the fuel bed, and finally from the surface of the bed and into the central void of the centrifuge, all of which needed to be measured accurately, requiring calibration of not only the sensors but also known losses unique to the test stand itself.

The tests themselves were undertaken with a range of glass particle sizes from 100 to 500 micrometers in diameter, similar to the earlier tests, as well as 500 micrometer copper particles to more closely replicate the density of the U-ZrC fuel. Rotation rates of between1,000 and 2,000 rpm, and gas flow rates from 1,340-1,800 scf/m (38-51 m^3/min) were used with the glass beads, and from 700-1,500 rpm with the copper particles (the lower rotation rate was due to gas pressure feed limitations preventing the bed from becoming fully fluidized with the more massive particles).

Finally, there were a series of physics and mechanical engineering design calculations that were carried out to continue to develop the nuclear engineering, mechanical design, and system optimization of the final RBR.

The results from the initial testing were promising: much of the testing was focused on getting the new test stand commissioned and calibrated, with a focus on figuring out how to both use the rig as it was constructed as well as which parts (such as the photography setup) could be improved in the next fiscal year of testing. However, particle dynamics in the fuidized bed were comfortably within stable, expected behavior, and while there were interesting findings as to the variation in pressure drop along the axis of the central void, this was something that could be worked with.

Based on the calculations performed, as well as the experiments carried out in the first year of the program, a range of engines were determined for both 233U and 235U variants:

Work Continues: 1971-1972

This led directly into the 1971-72 series of experiments and calculations. Now that the test stand had been mostly completed (although modifications would continue), and the behavior of the test stand was now well-understood, more focused experimentation could continue, and the calculations of the physics and engineering considerations in the reactor and engine system could be advanced on a more firm footing.

One major change in this year’s design choices was the shift toward a low-thrust, high-isp system, in part due to greater interest at NASA and the AEC in a smaller NTR than the original design envelope. While analyzing the proposed engine size above, though, it was discovered that the smallest two reactors were simply not practical, meaning that the smallest design was over 1 GW power level.

Another thing that was emphasized during this period from the optimization side of the program was the mass of the reflector. Since the low thrust option was now the main thrust of the design, any increase in the mass of the reactor system has a larger impact on the thrust-to-weight ratio, but reducing the reflector thickness also increases the neutron leakage rate. In order to prevent this, a narrower nozzle throat is preferred, but also increases thermal loading across the throat itself, meaning that additional cooling, and probably more mass, is needed – especially in a high-specific-impulse (aka high temperature) system. This also has the effect of needing higher chamber pressures to maintain the desired thrust level (a narrower throat with the same mass flow throughput means that the pressure in the central void has to be higher).

These changes required a redesign of the reactor itself, with a new critical configuration:

Hendrie 1972

One major change is how fluidized the bed actually is during operation. In order to get full fluidization, there needs to be enough inward (“upward” in terms of force vectors) velocity at the inner surface of the fuel body to lift the fuel particles without losing them out the nozzle. During calculations in both the first and second years, two major subsystems contributed hugely to the weight and were very dependent on both the rotational speed and the pellet size/mass: the weight of the frit and motor system, which holds the fuel particles, and the weight of the nozzle, which not only forms the outlet-end containment structure for the fuel but also (through the challenges of rocket motor dynamics) is linked to the chamber pressure of the reactor – oh, and the narrower the nozzle, the less surface area is available to reject the heat from the propellant, so the harder it is to keep cool enough that it doesn’t melt.

Now, fluidization isn’t a binary system: a pebblebed reactor is able to be settled (no fluidization), partially fluidized (usually expressed as a percentage of the pebblebed being fluidized), and fully fluidized to varying degrees (usually expressed as a percentage of the volume occupied by the pebbles being composed of the fluid). So there’s a huge range, from fully settled to >95% fluid in a fully fluidized bed.

The designers of the RBR weren’t going for excess fluidization: at some point, the designer faces diminishing returns on the complications required for increased fluid flow to maintain that level of particulate (I’m sure it’s the same, with different criteria, in the chemical industry, where most fluidized beds actually are used), both due to the complications of having more powerful turbopumps for the hydrogen as well as the loss of thermalization of that hydrogen because there’s simply too much propellant to be heated fully – not to mention fuel loss from the particulate fuel being blown out of the nozzle – so the calculations for the bed dynamics assumed minimal full fluidization (i.e. when all the pebbles are moving in the reactor) as the maximum flow rate – somewhere around 70% gas in the fuel volume (that number was never specifically defined that I found in the source documentation, if it was, please let me know), but is dependent on both the pressure drop in the reactor (which is related to the mass of the particle bed) and the gas flow.

Ludewig 1974

However, the designers at this point decided that full fluidization wasn’t actually necessary – and in fact was detrimental – to this particular NTR design. Because of the dynamics of the design, the first particles to be fluidized were on the inner surface of the fuel bed, and as the fluidization percentage increased, the pebbles further toward the outer circumference became fluidized. Because the temperature difference between the fuel and the propellant is greater as the propellant is being injected through the frit and into the fuel body, more heat is carried away by the propellant per unit mass, and as the propellant warms up, thermal transfer becomes less efficient (the temperature difference between two different objects is one of the major variables in how much energy is transferred for a given surface area), and fluidization increases that efficiency between a solid and a fluid.

Because of this, the engineers re-thought what “minimal fluidization” actually meant. If the bed could be fluidized enough to maximize the benefit of that dynamic, while at a minimum level of fluidization to minimize the volume the pebblebed actually took up in the reactor, there would be a few key benefits:

  1. The fueled volume of the reactor could be smaller, meaning that the nozzle could be wider, so they could have lower chamber pressure and also more surface area for active cooling of the nozzle
  2. The amount of propellant flow could be lower, meaning that turbopump assemblies could be smaller and lighter weight
  3. The frit could be made less robustly, saving on weight and simplifying the challenges of the bearings for the frit assembly
  4. The nozzle, frit, and motor/drive assembly for the frit are all net neutron poisons in the RBR, meaning that minimizing any of these structures’ overall mass improves the neutron economy in the reactor, leading to either a lower mass reactor or a lower U mass fraction in the fuel (as we discussed in the 233U vs. 235U design trade-off)

After going through the various options, the designers decided to go with a partially fluidized bed. At this point in the design evolution, they decided on having about 50% of the bed by mass being fluidized, with the rest being settled (there’s a transition point in the fuel body where partial fluidization is occurring, and they discuss the challenges of modeling that portion in terms of the dynamics of the system briefly). This maximizes the benefit at the circumference, where the thermal difference (and therefore the thermal exchange between the fuel and the propellant) is most efficient, while also thermalizing the propellant as much as possible as the temperature difference decreases from the propellant becoming increasingly hotter. They still managed to reach an impressive 2400 K propellant cavity temperature with this reactor, which makes it one of the hottest (and therefore highest isp) solid core NTR designs proposed at that time.

This has various implications for the reactor, including the density of the fissile component of the fuel (as well as the other solid components that make up the pebbles), the void fraction of the reactor (what part of the reactor is made up of something other than fuel, in this particular instance hydrogen within the fuel), and other components, requiring a reworking of the nuclear modeling for the reactor.

An interesting thing to me in the Annual Progress Report (linked below) is the description of how this new critical configuration was modeled; while this is reasonably common knowledge in nuclear engineers from the days before computational modeling (and even to the present day), I’d never heard someone explain it in the literature before.

Basically, they made a bunch of extremely simplified (in both number of dimensions and fidelity) one-dimensional models of various points in the reactor. They then assumed that they could rotate these around that elevation to make something like an MRI slice of the nuclear behavior in the reactor. Then, they moved far enough away that it was different enough (say, where the frit turns in to the middle of the reactor to hold the fuel, or the nozzle starts, or even the center of the fuel compared to the edge) that the dynamics would change, and did the same sort of one-dimensional model; they would end up doing this 18 times. Then, sort of like an MRI in reverse, they took these models, called “few-group” models, and combined them into a larger group – called a “macro-group” – for calculations that were able to handle the interactions between these different few-group simulations to build up a two-dimensional model of the reactor’s nuclear structure and determine the critical configuration of the reactor. They added a few other ways to subdivide the reactor for modeling, for instance they split the neutron spectrum calculations into fast and thermal, but this is the general shape of how nuclear modeling is done.

Ok, let’s get back to the RBR…

Experimental testing using the rotating pebblebed simulator continued through this fiscal year, with some modifications. A new, seamless frit structure was procured to eliminate some experimental uncertainty, the pressure measuring equipment was used to test more areas of the pressure drop across the system, and a challenge for the experimental team – finding 100 micrometer copper spheres that were regularly enough shaped to provide a useful analogue to the UC-ZrC fuel (Cu specific gravity 8.9, UC-ZrC specific gravity ~6.5) were finally able to be procured.

Additionally, while thermal transfer experiments had been done with the 1-gee small test apparatus which preceded the larger centrifugal setup (with variable gee forces available), the changes were too great to allow for accurate predictions on thermal transfer behavior. Therefore, thermal transfer experiments began to be examined on the new test rig – another expansion of the capabilities of the new system, which was now being used rigorously since its completing and calibration testing of the previous year. While they weren’t conducted that year, setting up an experimental program requires careful analysis of what the test rig is capable of, and how good data accuracy can be achieved given the experimental limitations of the design.

The major achievement for the year’s ex[experimentation was a refining of the relationship between particle size, centrifugal force, and pressure drop of the propellant from the turbopump to the frit inlet to the central cavity, most especially from the frit to the inner cavity through the fuel body, on a wide range of particle sizes, flow rates, and bed fluidization levels, which would be key as the design for the RBR evolved.

The New NTR Design: Mid-Thrust, Small RBR

So, given the priorities at both the AEC and NASA, it was decided that it was best to focus primarily on a given thrust, and try and optimize thrust-to-weight ratios for the reactor around that thrust level, in part because the outlet temperature of the reactor – and therefore the specific impulse – was fixed by the engineering decisions made in regards to the rest of the reactor design. In this case, the target thrust was was 90 kN (20,230 lbf), or about 120% of a Pewee-class engine.

This, of course, constrained the reactor design, which at this point in any reactor’s development is a good thing. Every general concept has a huge variety of options to play with: fuel type (oxide, carbide, nitride, metal, CERMET, etc), fissile component (233U and 235U being the big ones, but 242mAm, 241Cf, and other more exotic options exist), thrust level, physical dimensions, fuel size in the case of a PBR, and more all can be played with to a huge degree, so having a fixed target to work towards in one metric allows a reference point that the rest of the reactor can work around.

Also, having an optimization point to work from is important, in this case thrust-to-weight ratio (T/W). Other options, such as specific impulse, for a target to maximize would lead to a very different reactor design, but at the time T/W was considered the most valuable consideration since one way or another the specific impulse would still be higher than the prismatic core NTRs currently under development as part of the NERVA program (being led by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory and NASA, undergoing regular hot fire testing at the Jackass Flats, NV facility). Those engines, while promising, were limited by poor T/W ratios, so at the time a major goal for NTR improvement was to increase the T/W ratio of whatever came after – which might have been the RBR, if everything went smoothly.

One of the characteristics that has the biggest impact on the T/W ratio in the RBR is the nozzle throat diameter. The smaller the diameter, the higher the chamber pressure, which reduces the T/W ratio while increasing the amount of volume the fuel body can occupy given the same reactor dimensions – meaning that smaller fuel particles could be used, since there’s less chance that they would be lost out of the narrower nozzle throat. However, by increasing the nozzle throat diameter, the T/W ratio improved (up to a point), and the chamber pressure could be decreased, but at the cost of a larger particle size; this increases the thermal stresses in the fuel particles, and makes it more likely that some of them would fail – not as catastrophic as on a prismatic fueled reactor by any means, but still something to be avoided at all costs. Clearly a compromise would need to be reached.

Here are some tables looking at the design options leading up to the 90 kN engine configuration with both the 233U and 235U fueled versions of the RBR:

After analyzing the various options, a number of lessons were learned:

  1. It was preferable to work from a fixed design point (the 90 kN thrust level), because while the reactor design was flexible, operating near an optimized power level was more workable from a reactor physics and thermal engineering point of view
  2. The main stress points on the design were reflector weight (one of the biggest mass components in the system), throat diameter (from both a mass and active cooling point of view as well as fuel containment), and particle size (from a thermal stress and heat transfer point of view)
  3. On these lower-trust engines, 233U was looking far better than 235U for the fissile component, with a T/W ratio (without radiation shielding) of 65.7 N/kg compared to 33.3 N/kg respectively
    1. As reactor size increased, this difference reduced significantly, but with a constrained thrust level – and therefore reactor power – the difference was quite significant.

The End of the Line: RBR Winds Down

1973 was a bad year in the astronuclear engineering community. The flagship program, NERVA, which was approaching flight ready status with preparations for the XE-PRIME test, the successful testing of the flexible, (relatively) inexpensive Nuclear Furnace about to occur to speed not only prismatic fuel element development but also a variety of other reactor architectures (such as the nuclear lightbulb we began looking at last time), and the establishment of a robust hot fire testing structure at Jackass Flats, was fighting for its’ life – and its’ funding – in the halls of Congress. The national attention, after the success of Apollo 11, was turning away from space, and the missions that made NTR technologically relevant – and a good investment – were disappearing from the mission planners’ “to do” lists, and migrating to “if we only had the money” ideas. The Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor would be one of those casualties, and wouldn’t even last through the 1971/72 fiscal year.

This doesn’t mean that more work wasn’t done at Brookhaven, far from it! Both analytical and experimental work would continue on the design, with the new focus on the 90 kN thrust level, T/W optimized design discussed above making the effort more focused on the end goal.

Multi-program computational architecture used in 1972/73 for RBR, Hoffman 1973

On the analytical side, many of the components had reasonably good analytical models independently, but they weren’t well integrated. Additionally, new and improved analytical models for things like the turbopump system, system mass, temp and pressure drop in the reactor, and more were developed over the last year, and these were integrated into a unified modeling structure, involving multiple stacked models. For more information, check out the 1971-72 progress report linked in the references section.

The system developed was on the verge of being able to do dynamics modeling of the proposed reactor designs, and plans were laid out for what this proposed dynamic model system would look like, but sadly by the time this idea was mature enough to implement, funding had run out.

On the experimental side, further refinement of the test apparatus was completed. Most importantly, because of the new design requirements, and the limitations of the experiments that had been conducted so far, the test-bed’s nitrogen supply system had to be modified to handle higher gas throughput to handle a much thicker fuel bed than had been experimentally tested. Because of the limited information about multi-gee centrifugal force behavior in a pebblebed, the current experimental data could only be used to inform the experimental course needed for a much thicker fuel bed, as was required by the new design.

Additionally, as was discussed from the previous year, thermal transfer testing in the multi-gee environment was necessary to properly evaluate thermal transfer in this novel reactor configuration, but the traditional methods of thermal transfer simply weren’t an option. Normally, the procedure would be to subject the bed to alternating temperatures of gas: cold gas would be used to chill the pebbles to gas-ambient temperatures, then hot gas would be used on the chilled pebbles until they achieved thermal equilibrium at the new temperature, and then cold gas would be used instead, etc. The temperature of the exit gas, pebbles, and amount of gas (and time) needed to reach equilibrium states would be analyzed, allowing for accurate heat transfer coefficients at a variety of pebble sizes, centrifugal forces, propellant flow rates, etc. would be able to be obtained, but at the same time this is a very energy-intensive process.

An alternative was proposed, which would basically split the reactor’s propellant inlet into two halves, one hot and one cold. Stationary thermocouples placed through the central void in the centrifuge would record variations in the propellant at various points, and the gradient as the pebbles moved from hot to cold gas and back could get good quality data at a much lower energy cost – at the cost of data fidelity reducing in proportion to bed thickness. However, for a cash-strapped program, this was enough to get the data necessary to proceed with the 90 kN design that the RBR program was focused on.

Looking forward, while the team knew that this was the end of the line as far as current funding was concerned, they looked to how their data could be applied most effectively. The dynamics models were ready to be developed on the analytical side, and thermal cycling capability in the centrifugal test-bed would prepare the design for fission-powered testing. The plan was to address the acknowledged limitations with the largely theoretical dynamic model with hot-fired experimental data, which could be used to refine the analytical capabilities: the more the system was constrained, and the more experimental data that was collected, the less variability the analytical methods had to account for.

NASA had proposed a cavity reactor test-bed, which would serve primarily to test the open and closed cycle gas core NTRs also under development at the time, which could theoretically be used to test the RBR as well in a hot-fore configuration due to its unique gas injection system. Sadly, this test-bed never came to be (it was canceled along with most other astronuclear programs), so the faint hope for fission-powered RBR testing in an existing facility died as well.

The Last Gasp for the RBR

The final paper that I was able to find on the Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor was by Ludewig, Manning, and Raseman of Brookhaven in the Journal of Spacecraft, Vol 11, No 2, in 1974. The work leading up to the Brookhaven program, as well as the Brookhaven program itself, was summarized, and new ideas were thrown out as possibilities as well. It’s evident reading the paper that they still saw the promise in the RBR, and were looking to continue to develop the project under different funding structures.

Other than a brief mention of the possibility of continuous refueling, though, the system largely sits where it was in the middle of 1973, and from what I’ve seen no funding was forthcoming.

While this was undoubtedly a disappointing outcome, as virtually every astronuclear program in history has faced, and the RBR never revived, the concept of a pebblebed NTR would gain new and better-funded interest in the decades to come.

This program, which has its own complex history, will be the subject for our next blog post: Project Timberwind and the Space Nuclear Thermal Propulsion program.

Conclusion

While the RBR was no more, the idea of a pebblebed NTR would live on, as I mentioned above. With a new, physically demanding job, finishing up moving, and the impacts of everything going on in the world right now, I’m not sure exactly when the next blog post is going to come out, but I have already started it, and it should hopefully be coming in relatively short order! After covering Timberwind, we’ll look at MITEE (the whole reason I’m going down this pebblebed rabbit hole, not that the digging hasn’t been fascinating!), before returning to the closed cycle gas core NTR series (which is already over 50 pages long!).

As ever, I’d like to thank my Patrons on Patreon (www.patreon.com/beyondnerva), especially in these incredibly financially difficult times. I definitely would have far more motivation challenges now than I would have without their support! They get early access to blog posts, 3d modeling work that I’m still moving forward on for an eventual YouTube channel, exclusive content, and more. If you’re financially able, consider becoming a Patron!

You can also follow me at https://twitter.com/BeyondNerva for more regular updates!

References

Rotating Fluidized Bed Reactor

Hendrie et al, “ROTATING FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR FOR SPACE NUCLEAR PROPULSION Annual Report: Design Studies and Experimental Results, June, 1970- June, 1971,” Brookhaven NL, August 1971 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19720017961.pdf

Hendrie et al, “ROTATING FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR FOR SPACE NUCLEAR PROPULSION Annual Report: Design Studies and Experimental Results, June 1971 – June 1972,” Brookhaven NL, Sept. 1972 https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/04/061/4061469.pdf

Hoffman et al, “ROTATING FLUIDIZED BED REACTOR FOR SPACE NUCLEAR PROPULSION Annual Report: Design Studies and Experimental Results, July 1972 – January 1973,” Brookhaven NL, Sept 1973 https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/05/125/5125213.pdf

Cavity Test Reactor

Whitmarsh, Jr, C. “PRELIMINARY NEUTRONIC ANALYSIS OF A CAVITY TEST REACTOR,” NASA Lewis Research Center 1973 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730009949.pdf

Whitmarsh, Jr, C. “NUCLEAR CHARACTERISTICS OF A FISSIONING URANIUM PLASMA TEST REACTOR WITH LIGHT -WATER COOLING,” NASA Lewis Research Center 1973 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19730019930.pdf

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