Very much this! We have this amazing technology to split atoms in a controlled fashion, just so we can heat a pot of water to generate steam to drive a turbine. I mean - you'd think we'd have better ways of converting energy by now.
EZ, get rid of the entire secondary circuit, including gearbox and prop. >seawater inlet >turn into steam >shoot it out the back of the sub
Like a nuclear powered pop pop boat.
>boiling seawater
Enjoy your massive amounts of irradiated corrosion
Supercavitating sub gasify the surface of the craft. Skidaddle fast when a plane spots you.
Cavitation makes noise. >plane spotting you
That's the last thing a nuclear submarine is worried about
The nuclear propulsion system the US navy developed is as close to perfect as it can get
first of all id make the bluprints bigger so the fabricator could read them
secondly after watching that film about the nuclear sub going bad, maybe it would be better to put the nuclear power station on dry land and feed power via cables back to the sub
I know how to build that. You take two plates and make them then parallel opposite each other then play high voltage in the water will move through the plates at with no noise.
By replacing that water primary circuit with molten lead.
The only problem with the Alfa class was the Russians were too poor to keep them out of port and doing their fricking job.
I mean, lead isn't super high for a melting point.
The reactor runs hot enough under load to keep everything molten, but while the Alfa's were in port they needed external heating circuits to keep everything molten. And if it ever does solidify, there's no way to recover the unit since you can't manipulate the neutron moderators while they are fused in fricking lead.
Hence the comment, "the Russians were too poor to keep them out of port and doing their fricking job."
they can get them back running, just not using the reactor inside the sub
they have to heat them externally (like you mentioned)
it's expensive to get them started again but less expensive than building a new sub
someone at some point likely decided it was cheaper to do it this way than the alternative, there is so much money here that likely very little happens by accident
(this is all assuming we're referring to the same event, any search related to this is drowned out by Russia-Ukraine conflict stuff)
The higher the temp you run the reactor at, the power efficient it is and the more more power you can generate. Molten lead/bismuth/salts lets you run it at much higher temps than water cooling, so you can have either a smaller reactor assembly or mo powa. The reactor in a Soviet Alfa (OK-550?) put out almost three times the thermal energy of contemporary US reactors like the S5W in a similar footprint.
well might try a closed cycle gas turbine instead of steam since those can be built significantly smaller and more compact, the working fluid can be organic or cfc refrigerant or any gas really could use plain air for all i care, while heated water, steam, or even molten salt by the reactor is fed into a heat exchanger to the do the switcharo, the heat rejection can be done over the outside surface of the sub since the temperature of sea water is much lower than the exhaust temp...
thought about drawing a sketch but its too much of hassle so sorry no pic
i have an idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that i call maxwells demon core.
basically its a pair of tungsten balls filled with almost natural uranium.
the outer ball is made of pure tungsten and the inner ball is made of tungsten carbide.
you heat the ball until it is 3000F
this liquifies the uranium
you spin the ball until it spontaneously generates heat
the density of tungsten carbide is such that it is the lightest element(currently) in the core, it will form the inner neutron reflector
elemental tungsten is more dense than 238 or 235, so it will happily stay on the outside of the sphere.
but the liquid natural uranium has a mix of 235 and 238 in it.
normally we get the 235 out of 238 by carefully concentrating it for months at very low temperatures
i say we ride the line of hot as frick, make the uranium very liquid, then spin the thing to produce a ring of criticality, and back it off as necessary.
all of the waste products of the fission, being much lighter than anything in the sphere, will tend to float toward the center of the sphere.
tungsten carbide having a lower melting temperature than elemental tungsten, can cause the inner sphere to turn liquid and allow the waste gasses to pass through to the center and trap them there so as to not interfere with neutrons creating useful fission products out of the 238 in the solution.
it's not even the safety stuff it's just a really out there design with a lot of impracticalities but the liquid centrifuge thing during operation is a quite nice and elegant idea
safety wise you just slap this in a big concrete box and even if it fails it wouldn't be too bad
spinning a big heavy object like this would be quite prone to damage and probably quite energy inefficient (the centrifuging at the start of any enrichment is the biggest energy sink anyway and this way you have to do it every time you switch the reactor off and back on again)
also how would you get the heat energy out whilst also maintaining the high temperature and also having it spin really really fast? that's one of the trickiest bits to me because anything with a sealant ring is going to get absolutely fricked up by the high momentum involved here
have you heard of the nuclear lightbulb?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
your design reminds me of that, and you've probably taken a bit of inspiration from TRISO pebblebeds too, right? cool ideas all round
yeah i was thinking of it more for a home-sized reactor or a spaceship's reactor than sub's reactor.
a large scale reactor you could really play around with the composition of the fluid.
also thought we might be able to create a thruster of some kind by spinning the fluid at a great enough force that that can create a gap in the center and then open an aperature and then basically belch superheated waste products out of the top.
I have seen articles on liquid uranium reactors. The trouble was that it is chemically very aggressive. The sinning encapsulated take is new though, in a good way. If you can siphon off the lighter elements like strontium, you might avoid ever having to refuel the reactor core, especially if you convert the U238 to U235.
I am not sure who would be sufficiently crazy to try.
at a given concentration of 235 in 238, if they had perfect flow, you would only need to spin the sphere at a known, very easily caluable speed, to get the ring of 235 you need to achieve criticality. now, you could just start spinning this thing at that speed, at the exact melting temp of natural uranium, and wait for the months(years?) it takes the 235 to migrate through that sludge. or you could give it some gas and get it really runny by getting it closer to the maximum operating temp of the reactor(the melting point of elemental tungsten), and spin it a bunch faster to get it to quickly start dissolving the 235 into the criticality layer, and then back it off.
if it were a thruster on a space ship, you could have a liquid uranium lifeblood system that you pass through tungsten pipes to the individual centrifuges, and impregnate the fluid with any sort of a gas, and it would tend to migrate toward the center of the centrifuge as it passes into the spinning cup of the thruster, be superheated all the fast neutrons, and then fly out the opening at i have no idea how fast.
this is subhuman boomer trash.
my grandmothers husband was a nuke tech on a u.s. sub. he died of cancer and so did she. her skin basically fried off her over a number of years and she looked like a monster off a stephen king movie.
i'd kill the Black folk and tv/air conditioners then there wouldn't be a need for this crap.
I have no proof or any engineering education but I suspect American sub reactors are of a type called super critical water reactors and don't actually have a steam generator or secondary loop.
>I have no proof or any engineering education but I suspect American sub reactors are of a type called super critical water reactors and don't actually have a steam generator or secondary loop.
SupercriticaI? No steam generators? No Secondary loop? BWR?
Graphene could potentially be used to create more efficient vibration damping and acoustic insulation materials, which could help reduce noise in submarines.
built a magnetohydrodynamic drive (or as I call it a caterpillar driver). Would be almost silent and undetectable by current methods. It's simple to do
nice, a submarine thread. something that's bothered me forever about submarines is how they make the sonar ping. I tried looking it up and there's not many specifics about what exact mechanism makes such a powerful signal. is it like a clapper hitting the wall of a bell? is it purely electronic? the closest I got to an answer was that "mechanisms onboard the vessel amplify the signal". real helpful.
I read a sonar ping can kill divers if they're close enough, what could produce so much power? it's obviously not a giant speaker somewhere on the sub.
You can literally look at the Sonar article on wikipedia and see all the history up until 1950. And then it stops, and you don't need to be a genius to figure out why.
But the short answer is piezoelectric transducers or magnetostrictive transducers.
If they've found anything better than that, we'll have to wait quite a while to find out.
>something that's bothered me forever about submarines is how they make the sonar ping
Checked patent literature? Plain google search failes here but they have a specialised version:
https://patents.google.com/?q=(sonar+transducer)&oq=sonar+transducer
You can literally look at the Sonar article on wikipedia and see all the history up until 1950. And then it stops, and you don't need to be a genius to figure out why.
But the short answer is piezoelectric transducers or magnetostrictive transducers.
If they've found anything better than that, we'll have to wait quite a while to find out.
>wikipedia and see all the history up until 1950
This just goe to prove Wikipedia is not that good. The patent search showed a lot of US defence related applicants up to early 2000s.
I would scrap it and make America do all the work, while they pay for their military, our society should be investing in educating people to work in their military and act as lords over peasant Americans blue slave collar workers.
heat water
spin turbine
????
profit
trash thread anyhow, go back to PrepHole
RGB backlighting behind all the pipes. And make it pulse to the music so the squiddies can have a good time.
it's probably good enough
>How would you guys improve a Nuclear-Powered Submarine Propulsion system?
>nuclear powered
is it though? I mean it's really steam powered.
The nuclear makes the steam
The steam is made of nuclears though
Very much this! We have this amazing technology to split atoms in a controlled fashion, just so we can heat a pot of water to generate steam to drive a turbine. I mean - you'd think we'd have better ways of converting energy by now.
Man fear the pressure of Supercritical CO2.
>improve
What aspect?
I would fill the submarine with pawgs and feed them nothing but beans for a brap powered submarine...
fishing for sqeps who've forgotten what's public, chang?
EZ, get rid of the entire secondary circuit, including gearbox and prop.
>seawater inlet
>turn into steam
>shoot it out the back of the sub
Like a nuclear powered pop pop boat.
>boiling seawater
Enjoy your massive amounts of irradiated corrosion
Cavitation makes noise.
>plane spotting you
That's the last thing a nuclear submarine is worried about
The nuclear propulsion system the US navy developed is as close to perfect as it can get
first of all id make the bluprints bigger so the fabricator could read them
secondly after watching that film about the nuclear sub going bad, maybe it would be better to put the nuclear power station on dry land and feed power via cables back to the sub
Well considering no one on the planet that knows anything about it is ever going to posy anything about it. A
Maybe they should have a reactor heat up some water and use steam to spin a thingy. Or have the super thing from Red October.
>Or have the super thing from Red October.
I know how to build that. You take two plates and make them then parallel opposite each other then play high voltage in the water will move through the plates at with no noise.
>I know how to build that
no you don't, you can't build anything electronic.
>Well considering no one on the planet that knows anything about it is ever going to posy anything about it.
THIS.
Supercavitating sub gasify the surface of the craft. Skidaddle fast when a plane spots you.
just use solid state Thermoelectric generator on 1st circuit
By replacing that water primary circuit with molten lead.
The only problem with the Alfa class was the Russians were too poor to keep them out of port and doing their fricking job.
the alfa was such a sick sub, imagine seeing that monster breach the surface at full speed
>molten lead cooling system
how does one even comes up with this idea
does the whole system have the ability to heat up and melt the lead in the pipes?
I mean, lead isn't super high for a melting point.
The reactor runs hot enough under load to keep everything molten, but while the Alfa's were in port they needed external heating circuits to keep everything molten. And if it ever does solidify, there's no way to recover the unit since you can't manipulate the neutron moderators while they are fused in fricking lead.
Hence the comment, "the Russians were too poor to keep them out of port and doing their fricking job."
they can get them back running, just not using the reactor inside the sub
they have to heat them externally (like you mentioned)
it's expensive to get them started again but less expensive than building a new sub
someone at some point likely decided it was cheaper to do it this way than the alternative, there is so much money here that likely very little happens by accident
(this is all assuming we're referring to the same event, any search related to this is drowned out by Russia-Ukraine conflict stuff)
Give the neutron moderators a screw/drill bit shape.
There are molten salt so of course something like solder would work
The higher the temp you run the reactor at, the power efficient it is and the more more power you can generate. Molten lead/bismuth/salts lets you run it at much higher temps than water cooling, so you can have either a smaller reactor assembly or mo powa. The reactor in a Soviet Alfa (OK-550?) put out almost three times the thermal energy of contemporary US reactors like the S5W in a similar footprint.
>molten lead
ZIRCONIUM-TIN
>alfa class
Fricking rad, the fact we came up with a completely new torpedo just to catch up with it is nuts
>meanwhile on PrepHole...
"GREETINGS FELLOW AMERINSKIS. HOW WOULD YOU IMPROVE COMPUTER WEAPON SYSTEM ON TANK?"
BASED BASED BASED BASED
nah thats k
Not DIY. Stupid thread. You knew this.
Frick off homosexual.
I vaguely remember MacGyver doing it with a rubber band. I'd try to improvise based on that fuzzy memory.
There is no replacement for displacement
probably make it bigger to go more faster. yeah that’s what i’m thinking. maybe more propellers cause that looks cooler.
also pls go away mr. xi
well might try a closed cycle gas turbine instead of steam since those can be built significantly smaller and more compact, the working fluid can be organic or cfc refrigerant or any gas really could use plain air for all i care, while heated water, steam, or even molten salt by the reactor is fed into a heat exchanger to the do the switcharo, the heat rejection can be done over the outside surface of the sub since the temperature of sea water is much lower than the exhaust temp...
thought about drawing a sketch but its too much of hassle so sorry no pic
i have an idea for a new type of nuclear reactor that i call maxwells demon core.
basically its a pair of tungsten balls filled with almost natural uranium.
the outer ball is made of pure tungsten and the inner ball is made of tungsten carbide.
you heat the ball until it is 3000F
this liquifies the uranium
you spin the ball until it spontaneously generates heat
the density of tungsten carbide is such that it is the lightest element(currently) in the core, it will form the inner neutron reflector
elemental tungsten is more dense than 238 or 235, so it will happily stay on the outside of the sphere.
but the liquid natural uranium has a mix of 235 and 238 in it.
normally we get the 235 out of 238 by carefully concentrating it for months at very low temperatures
i say we ride the line of hot as frick, make the uranium very liquid, then spin the thing to produce a ring of criticality, and back it off as necessary.
all of the waste products of the fission, being much lighter than anything in the sphere, will tend to float toward the center of the sphere.
tungsten carbide having a lower melting temperature than elemental tungsten, can cause the inner sphere to turn liquid and allow the waste gasses to pass through to the center and trap them there so as to not interfere with neutrons creating useful fission products out of the 238 in the solution.
this is crazy as hell and there's like a million things wrong with it but... i like it
i think it could be made to be pretty safe but im acknowledging the threat by calling it a demon core.
it's not even the safety stuff it's just a really out there design with a lot of impracticalities but the liquid centrifuge thing during operation is a quite nice and elegant idea
safety wise you just slap this in a big concrete box and even if it fails it wouldn't be too bad
spinning a big heavy object like this would be quite prone to damage and probably quite energy inefficient (the centrifuging at the start of any enrichment is the biggest energy sink anyway and this way you have to do it every time you switch the reactor off and back on again)
also how would you get the heat energy out whilst also maintaining the high temperature and also having it spin really really fast? that's one of the trickiest bits to me because anything with a sealant ring is going to get absolutely fricked up by the high momentum involved here
have you heard of the nuclear lightbulb?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_lightbulb
your design reminds me of that, and you've probably taken a bit of inspiration from TRISO pebblebeds too, right? cool ideas all round
yeah i was thinking of it more for a home-sized reactor or a spaceship's reactor than sub's reactor.
a large scale reactor you could really play around with the composition of the fluid.
also thought we might be able to create a thruster of some kind by spinning the fluid at a great enough force that that can create a gap in the center and then open an aperature and then basically belch superheated waste products out of the top.
I have seen articles on liquid uranium reactors. The trouble was that it is chemically very aggressive. The sinning encapsulated take is new though, in a good way. If you can siphon off the lighter elements like strontium, you might avoid ever having to refuel the reactor core, especially if you convert the U238 to U235.
I am not sure who would be sufficiently crazy to try.
at a given concentration of 235 in 238, if they had perfect flow, you would only need to spin the sphere at a known, very easily caluable speed, to get the ring of 235 you need to achieve criticality. now, you could just start spinning this thing at that speed, at the exact melting temp of natural uranium, and wait for the months(years?) it takes the 235 to migrate through that sludge. or you could give it some gas and get it really runny by getting it closer to the maximum operating temp of the reactor(the melting point of elemental tungsten), and spin it a bunch faster to get it to quickly start dissolving the 235 into the criticality layer, and then back it off.
now, i know this sounds like it's playing with fire - and it's definitely playing with fire
but because of the simplicity of this design you can make a single unit of these things REALLY SMALL.
like so small that it would be like a burner on a hot water heater rather than an enormous fricking thing that if it goes the whole sub goes
if it were a thruster on a space ship, you could have a liquid uranium lifeblood system that you pass through tungsten pipes to the individual centrifuges, and impregnate the fluid with any sort of a gas, and it would tend to migrate toward the center of the centrifuge as it passes into the spinning cup of the thruster, be superheated all the fast neutrons, and then fly out the opening at i have no idea how fast.
Chang is getting desperate
Go back to your containment board troony threads, /k/uck.
more pollution more speed
Well the seawater condenser seems like a waste of energy, but energy isnt really the problem with nuclear.
So maybe paint it a nice color, like blue, everybody likes blue.
what else would you use as a heat sink?
no matter how sad this guy's life gets it will never hold a candle to those who post edrama on PrepHole
back to kiwifarms with you
too smol
CON SONAR CRAZY IVAN
this is subhuman boomer trash.
my grandmothers husband was a nuke tech on a u.s. sub. he died of cancer and so did she. her skin basically fried off her over a number of years and she looked like a monster off a stephen king movie.
i'd kill the Black folk and tv/air conditioners then there wouldn't be a need for this crap.
By positioning it off the coast of Palestine and dropping ballistic missiles on israel's occupied territories.
I have no proof or any engineering education but I suspect American sub reactors are of a type called super critical water reactors and don't actually have a steam generator or secondary loop.
Think bwr but high pressure instead of low
>I have no proof or any engineering education but I suspect American sub reactors are of a type called super critical water reactors and don't actually have a steam generator or secondary loop.
SupercriticaI? No steam generators? No Secondary loop? BWR?
I suspect you're fricking moronic.
Graphene could potentially be used to create more efficient vibration damping and acoustic insulation materials, which could help reduce noise in submarines.
built a magnetohydrodynamic drive (or as I call it a caterpillar driver). Would be almost silent and undetectable by current methods. It's simple to do
nice, a submarine thread. something that's bothered me forever about submarines is how they make the sonar ping. I tried looking it up and there's not many specifics about what exact mechanism makes such a powerful signal. is it like a clapper hitting the wall of a bell? is it purely electronic? the closest I got to an answer was that "mechanisms onboard the vessel amplify the signal". real helpful.
I read a sonar ping can kill divers if they're close enough, what could produce so much power? it's obviously not a giant speaker somewhere on the sub.
Look up the word "transducer".
You can literally look at the Sonar article on wikipedia and see all the history up until 1950. And then it stops, and you don't need to be a genius to figure out why.
But the short answer is piezoelectric transducers or magnetostrictive transducers.
If they've found anything better than that, we'll have to wait quite a while to find out.
>something that's bothered me forever about submarines is how they make the sonar ping
Checked patent literature? Plain google search failes here but they have a specialised version:
https://patents.google.com/?q=(sonar+transducer)&oq=sonar+transducer
>wikipedia and see all the history up until 1950
This just goe to prove Wikipedia is not that good. The patent search showed a lot of US defence related applicants up to early 2000s.
I would scrap it and make America do all the work, while they pay for their military, our society should be investing in educating people to work in their military and act as lords over peasant Americans blue slave collar workers.