| One concept being considered for steam generation in particular next generation nuclear reactor designs, involves water coming into direct contact with a circulating molten metal. To optimize the design of such direct contact heat exchange and vaporization systems, detailed knowledge is necessary of the various flow regimes, interfacial transport phenomena, heat transfer and operational stability. With the development of high performance digital detectors, radiography using X-rays or neutrons maybe a suitable technique to obtain information about that direct-contact interaction; i.e., void volume fractions, length scales and dynamic behavior. Under the basis of previous investigations, a complete methodology of the X-ray radiography for two-phase flow measurement has been developed from the facility and imaging analysis aspects. Through this developed methodology, a high energy X-ray imaging system is optimized for the direct-contact heat exchange experiment. Beside an on-line calibration procedure which practically quantifies the imaging system's performance, the extended linear system theory and Rose's model have also been used to evaluate the imaging system's performance, respectively. The bottleneck of the current imaging system and the future of system improvement direction have been pointed out. With our real-time, large-area high energy X-ray imaging system, the two-phase flow was visualized and stored digitally. An efficient image processing strategy has also been established by combining several optimal digital image processing algorithms. The approach has been implemented into a software computational tool written in MATLAB called T-XIP. Time-dependent heat transfer related variables, such as void fraction (void volume), local heat transfer coefficient, etc., were calculated using this software tool. Finally, an error analysis associated with the void fraction measurement has been given based on two procedures. |
