Design, Fabrication, And Testing Of Ceramic Plate-Type Heat Exchangers With Integrated Flow Channel Design

Novel plate-type heat exchangers (HXs) with high-power densities are proposed based on novel integrated flow channel designs. Net-shape plates were achieved by the molding of powder mixtures to wood-based composites (WBC's). HX stacks are built by plate-to-plate joining followed by pyrolysis and silicon melt infiltration. The C/SiSiC provided with PyC-SiC coating was gas-tight to helium up to 5.5 MPa. Corrosion tests with coupons were performed using a ternary eutectic fluoride salt (FLiNaK) as the intermediate heat transfer fluid. While SiC is vulnerable to corrosion by the salt, the coating offers a high degree of protection to the ceramic substrate.