Another variation of the liquid fueled NTR (LNTR, general information available here), the Liquid Annular Reactor System, or LARS, is a radiator-type LNTR, which uses molten carbide fuel in seven fuel elements.
The radiator LNTR would remain dormant for decades after the Lewis Research Center LNTR (information available here), as astronuclear funding was scarce and focused on particular, well-characterized systems (most of which were electric powerplant concepts, more information available here), until the start of the Space Exploration Initiative. In 1991, a conference was held to explore the use of various types of NTR in future crewed space missions. This led to many proposals, including one from the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York. This was the Liquid Annular Reactor System, or LARS.
A team of physicists and engineers, including Powell, Ludewig, Lazareth, and Maise decided to revisit the radiator LNTR design, but as far as I can tell didn’t use any of the research done by the LRC team. Due to the different design philosophies, lack of references, and also the general compartmentalization of knowledge within the different parts of the astronuclear community, I can only conclude that they began this design from scratch (if this is incorrect, and anyone has knowledge of this program, please get in contact with me!).
LARS was a very different design than the LRC concept, and seems to have gone through two distinct iterations. Rather than the high-pressure system that the LRC team investigated, this was a low-pressure, low-thrust design, which optimized a different characteristic: hydrogen dissociation. This maximizes the specific impulse of the NTR by reducing the mass of the propellant to the lowest theoretically possible mass while maintaining the temperature of the propellant (up to 1600 s, according to the BNL team). The other main distinction from the LRC design was the power level: rather than having a very powerful reactor (3000 to 5000 MWt), this was a modest reactor of only 200 MWt. This leads to a very different set of design tradeoffs, but many of the engineering and materials challenges remain the same.
LARS would continue to us NbC diluted with UC2, but the fuel would not completely melt in the fuel element, leaving a solid layer against the walls of the beryllium fuel element tube. This in turn would be regeneratively cooled with hydrogen flowing through a number of channels in the durm, as well as a gap surrounding the body of the fuel element which would also be filled with cold hydrogen. A drive system would be attached on the cold end of the tube to spin it at an appropriate rate (which was not detailed in the papers). The main changes were in the fuel element configuration, size, and number.
The first iteration of LARS was an interesting concept, using a folded-flow system. This used many small fuel element tubes, arranged in a similar manner to the flow channels in the Dumbo reactor, with the propellant moving from the center of the reactor to the outer circumference, before being ejected out of the nozzle of the reactor. Each layer of fuel elements contained eleven individual tubes, with between 1 and 10 layers of fuel elements in the reactor. As the number of layers increased, the length and radius of the fuel elements decreased.
One of the important notes that was made by the team at this early design date was that the perpendicular fuel element orientation would minimize the amount of fission products that would be ejected from the rocket. I’m unable to determine how this was done, other than if they were solids which would stick to the outside of the propellant flue, however.
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to discover exactly why this design was abandoned for a more traditional LNTR architecture, but the need to cool the entire exterior of the reactor to keep it from melting seems to possibly be a concern. Reversing the flow, with the hot propellant being in the center of the reactor rather than the external circumference, seems like an easy fix if this was the primary concern, but the discussions of reactor architecture after this seem to pretty much ignore this early iteration. Another complication would be the complexity of the reactor architecture. Whether with dedicated motors, or with a geared system allowing one motor to spin multiple fuel elements, a complex system is needed to spin the fuel elements, which would not only be something which would potentially break down more, but also require far more mass than a simpler system.
The second version of LARS kept the same type of fuel, power output, and low pressure operation, but rather than using the folded flow concept it went with seven fuel elements in a beryllium body. The propellant would be used to cool first the nozzle of the rocket, then the rotating beryllium drum which contained the fuel element, before entering the main propellant channel. The final thermalization of the propellant would be facilitated by the use of tungsten microparticles in the H2, necessary due to the low partial pressure and high transparency of pure H2 (while the vapor pressure issues of any LNTR were acknowledged, the effect that this would have on the thermalization seems to have not been considered a significant factor in the seeding necessity) Two versions, defined by the emissivity of the fuel element, were proposed.
This design was targeted to reach up to 2000 s isp, but due to uncertainties in U loss rates (as well as C and Nb), the overall mass of the propellant upon exiting the reactor was uncertain, so the authors used a range of 1600-2000 s. The thrust of the engine was approximately 20,000 N, which would result in a T/W ratio of about 1;1 when including a shadow shield (one author points out that without the shield the ratio would be about 3-4/1.
I have been unable to find the research reports themselves for this program (unlike the LRC design), so the specifics of the reactor physics tradeoffs, engineering compromises, actual years of research and the like aren’t something that I’m able to discuss. The majority of my sources are conference papers and journal articles, which occurred in 1991 and 1992, but there was one paper from 1999, so it was at least under discussion through the 1990s (interestingly, that paper discussed using LARS for the 550 AU mission concept, which later got remade into the FOCAL gravitational lens mission: https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2010/11/15/a-focal-mission-into-the-oort-cloud/ ).
This seems to be the last time that LARS has been mentioned in the technical literature, so while it is mentioned as the “baseline” liquid core concept in places such as Atomic Rockets (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/enginelist2.php#id–Nuclear_Thermal–Liquid_Core–LARS) it has not been explored in depth since.
References
[Paywall] Conceptual Design of a LARS Based Propulsion System, Ludewig et al 1991 https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1991-3515
The Liquid Annular Reactor System (LARS) Propulsion, Powell et al 1991 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19910012832.pdf
LIQUID ANNULUS, Ludewig 1992 https://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19920001886.pdf
[Paywall] The liquid annular reactor system (LARS) for deep space exploration, Maise et al 1999 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0094576599000442