A Review on Pneumatic Transportation in The Design of Fuel Handling System in RDE-HTGR

A stable and reliable pneumatic transportation plays an important role in the operation of a pebble bed HTGR. The challenge in pneumatic transportation system is it produce side product in the form of graphite dust. The existance of the graphite dust at certain point might have the possibilities to disturb the performance and functionality of several component within the reactor. Due to this reason extensive researches to improve its performance have been conducted. In this paper, a review is presented on the operational characteristic of pneumatic transportation. This paper also presents recent researches on the improvement method of pneumatic transportation, that include the determination of optimum transportation pattern in pneumatic transportation, the study on gas transportation velocity, the effect of bend/arc pipeline on the graphite pebble velocity and the impact; dynamic analysis on wear behavior which occured during pneumatic transportation and the estimation on the number of graphite dust produced in the pneumatic transportation cycle. On basic principle and configuration of each technique, performance and limitation of the techniques are analyzed and compared from different views to demonstrate the recent development in the field and the possible approaches which may provide solution to the pneumatic transportation design.