A HEAT TRANSFER STUDY OF A NUCLEAR ROCKET REACTOR

Abstract

A digital computer program was developed to investigate the coolant temperature and pressure and the material temperatures in a nuclear rocket reactor. The reactor uses hydrogen gas as the coolant and is operating steady-state conditions. The program is written in FORTRAN for execution on an IBM 7090 digital computer. Reactor geometry, input conditions of the coolant, power, power distribution, and reactor fuel thermal conductivity are variable input qualities. The hydrogen is treated as a perfect gas and the reactor is assumed to be perfectly insulated. The coolant and material temperatures are determined by an iterative technique. The transport properties of hydrogen are computed by empirical formulas which include the effect of both temperature and pressure. The FORTRAN source program, operating instructions, a sample problem and sample output data are included as appendices.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Aug 01, 1963
Accession Number
AD0419313

Entities

People

  • Charles F. Demos

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Computer Programs
  • Computers
  • Digital Computers
  • Equations
  • Flow Rate
  • Fuel Cells
  • Geometry
  • Heat Transfer
  • Heat Transfer Coefficients
  • Hot Spots
  • Mass Flow
  • Materials
  • Nuclear Reactors
  • Steady State
  • Surface Temperature
  • Thermal Conductivity

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Combustion and Flow Dynamics.
  • Computer Science.

Technology Areas

  • Microelectronics