Journal of Nuclear Fuel Cycle and Waste Technology

Electrowinning process recovers uranium with actinide elements from spent fuels and is a key step in the Pyroprocessing because of proliferation resistance. An analysis of heat transfer of the Electrowinning cell was conducted to develop basic tool for designing engineering-scale Electrowinner. For the calculation of the heat transfer, ANSYS CFX commercial code was adapted. As a result of the calculation, the vertical Heating Zone length had great effect upon temperature of LiCl-KCl eutectic salt. To maintain constant temperature in the salt, the Heating Zone length should be three times longer than the height of the salt. However, the argon and salt temperatures were barely affected by the Cooling Zone length. The temperature under the Cell cover was mainly influenced by the number of the cooling plates. When the cooling plates were installed more than the number of 5, temperature under the cover was maintained below 250 ℃. These temperature properties had similar tendency toward the temperature of the Cell which was measured from experiments. Simulated heat transfer information from this study could be used to design engineering-scale Electrowinner.

Keywords

Pyroprocessing,Electrowinning,Heat transfer,LiCl-KCl eutectic salt,Pyroprocessing