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Iron-based oxygen carriers (OCs) have received much attention due to their low costs, high mechanical strengths and high-temperature stabilities in the chemical looping gasification (CLG) of biomass, but their chemical reactivity is very ordinary. Converter steel slags (CSSs) are steelmaking wastes and rich in Fe2O3, CaO and MgO, which have good oxidative ability and good stability as well as catalytic effects on biomass gasification. Therefore, the composite OCs prepared by mechanically mixing CSSs with iron-based OCs are expected to be used to increase the hydrogen production in the CLG of biomass. In this study, the catalytic performance of CSS/Fe2O3 composite OCs prepared by mechanically mixing CSSs with iron-based OCs on the gasification of brewers’ spent grains (BSGs) were investigated in a tubular furnace experimental apparatus. The results showed that when the weight ratio of the CSSs in composite OCs was 0.5, the relative volume fraction of hydrogen reached the maximum value of 49.1%, the product gas yield was 0.85 Nm3/kg and the gasification efficiency was 64.05%. It could be found by X-ray diffraction patterns and scanning electron microscope characterizations that the addition of CSSs helped to form MgFe2O4, which are efficient catalysts for H2 production. Owing to the large and widely distributed surface pores of CSSs, mixing them with iron-based OCs was beneficial for catalytic steam reforming to produce hydrogen.

This review thoroughly examines the impact of lean-solvent solid electrolyte (LSEs) on for safer and more durable lithium batteries. It also provides a comprehensive overview of existing LSEs.

The failure fraction of tri-structural isotropic (TRISO)-coated particles in the fuel elements of the core is a key indicator for characterizing the radiation safety of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) and can be determined from accurate measurement of the activity concentrations of noble gas fission products in the primary coolant. However, in the high-temperature gas-cooled reactor pebble-bed module (HTR-PM), the total γ activity concentration in the primary circuit is currently monitored online without individual nuclide resolution. In this study, an online monitoring instrument based on a HPGe detector is proposed to obtain the activity concentration of individual nuclide in real time. Geant4 simulates detection efficiency, background energy spectrum, and minimum detectable activity concentration (MDAC) of the monitoring system, which are key parameters for evaluating the reliability and feasibility of the system for detecting noble gas fission products. In addition, a method for quickly calculating the MDAC using fitting formulas with low and high precisions is proposed, meeting the accuracy requirements for engineering applications. This study promotes application of online nuclide resolution technology in HTGR for fast assessment of fuel-element performance in the core. The proposed rapid MDAC evaluation method for detection systems can also be applied in nuclear emergency monitoring.

A novel node collocation approach for the application of radial basis function meshless methods in neutron diffusion equations is presented in this paper. By introducing ghost nodes, the number and position of external nodes can be flexibly controlled to investigate their impact on the ill-conditioning of the coefficient matrix and the solution accuracy. The steady-state single-group neutron diffusion equation is solved using the improved method, and the discretization method and solution process are provided. The boundary scale factor, which measures the distance of external nodes from the computational domain, shows a negative correlation with the error once it stabilizes. An optimal boundary scale factor exists regarding its influence on the matrix condition number; as the shape factor of the radial basis function increases, the optimal value also increases. An increase in the number of layers of external nodes slightly enhances solution accuracy but significantly raises the condition number of the matrix. For a shape factor of 0.01, the computational error decreases by 4.01 % when the number of layers is increased from 1 to 4. When the outer number factor is small, fluctuations in the solution error are observed, with stability achieved once it exceeds 0.5. Although increasing the outer number factor raises the matrix condition number, its impact is less pronounced than that of increasing the number of layers.