Liquid Metal as a Heat Transport Fluid for Thermal Solar Power Applications

D. Frazer, Erich Stergar, C. Cionea, P. Hosemann, Serguei Gavrilov

    Research outputpeer-review

    Abstract

    Today, solar thermal plants do not operate at these high temperatures due to the fact that conventional heat transport fluids begin to disintegrate around 600 °C. For non-solar applications, low melting-temperature metals, such as wood's metal and lead- bismuth eutectic alloy, have been examined as heat-transport media, because of the large temperature ranges over which they remain liquid. Lead-bismuth eutectic alloy (LBE; 45% Pb, 55% Bi) melts at 125 °C and does not boil until 1670 °C, making it an ideal heat-transfer medium for application in thermal solar power. The main obstacle to using LBE is finding structural materials that can withstand the harsh corrosion environments at high temperatures. In this work the key issues of materials exposed to liquid metal are described while initial data on carious steels tested in liquid metal are provided. While corrosion is a significant issue in this environment, mechanical failure of steels in liquid metal are discussed as well
    Original languageEnglish
    Pages (from-to)627-636
    JournalEnergy Procedia
    Volume49
    DOIs
    StatePublished - Mar 2014
    EventSolarPACES 2013 International Conference - Las Vegas
    Duration: 17 Sep 201320 Sep 2013

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