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Experimental study on migration and heat transfer characteristics of three potential molten salts leaking into tank foundation materials

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Abstract

The leakage of molten salt tanks has attracted great attention in molten salt tower concentrating solar power plants. The current research on the leakage characteristics of molten salt mainly focuses on Solar Salt, and there is no report on the leakage characteristics of molten salt with great application potential, which is crucial to the design of molten salt tanks and their foundations in the future. In addition, there is no unified explanation for the morphological characteristics of the agglomerates formed after the molten salt leakage. In this paper, the migration and heat transfer characteristics of three potential molten salts (60–10-20–20 wt% KNO3-NaNO3-LiNO3-Ca(NO3)2.4H2O, 7.5–23.9–68.6 wt% NaCl–KCl-ZnCl2, 32.1–33.4–34.5 wt% Li2CO3–Na2CO3–K2CO3) leaking into the thermal tank foundation material are experimentally studied and compared with Solar Salt. The results indicate that both the operating temperature and molten salt type significantly affect the temperature rising rate of tank foundation and migration characteristics of molten salt. Increasing the operating temperature, the average temperature rising rate, maximum migration depth, maximum migration width and migration speed respectively increase, increase, decrease and increase. Compared with Solar Salt, the maximum migration depths of the three potential molten salts increase 56.3%, -11.6%, and -50.2%, and the maximum migration widths increase -22.7%, -16.7% and -2.7%, respectively. In addition, a model explaining the solidification and agglomeration of the molten salt is proposed and well verified by the experimental results.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Abbreviations

\(\alpha\) :

Volume fraction

\(\lambda\) :

Thermal conductivity (W/(m.K))

\(\delta\) :

Thickness (m)

\({L}_{1}\) :

Distance between the top of the solid molten salt block and the top of the fillers (mm)

\({L}_{2}\) :

Length of the solid molten salt block (mm)

\({L}_{3}\) :

Maximum migration depth (mm)

q :

Heat flux (W/m2)

\({T}_{op}\) :

Operating temperature (℃)

\(T\) :

Temperature (℃)

\(\Delta T\) :

Temperature difference in steady state after and before the molten salt leakage (℃)

\(TRR\) :

Temperature rising rate (℃/s)

\(t\) :

Time (min)

\(U\) :

Voltage (V)

\({W}_{m}\) :

Maximum migration width (mm)

\(z\) :

Coordinate (mm)

CSP:

Concentrating solar power

TES:

Thermal energy storage

CSF:

Continuous surface force

LECA:

Light expanded clay aggregate

SMSB:

Solid molten salt block

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Acknowledgements

The Project is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (52036008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Clean Energy Utilization, Institute for Thermal Power Engineering, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310027, China

    Yuhang Zuo, Hao Zhou, Mingrui Zhang, Fangzheng Cheng & Hua Shi

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  1. Yuhang Zuo
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Contributions

Yuhang Zuo: Conceptualization, Methodology, Investigation, Data curation, Writing—original draft, Writing—review & editing, Visualization. Hao Zhou: Conceptualization, Methodology, Resources, Supervision, Project administration, Funding acquisition. Mingrui Zhang: Investigation. Fangzheng Cheng: Investigation. Hua Shi: Investigation.

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Correspondence to Hao Zhou.

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Zuo, Y., Zhou, H., Zhang, M. et al. Experimental study on migration and heat transfer characteristics of three potential molten salts leaking into tank foundation materials. Heat Mass Transfer 59, 935–948 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00231-022-03303-1

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