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CAPE joins the UK’s National Nuclear User Facility

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ESPRC has announced that the University of Leeds, led by the School of Chemical and Process Engineering, is the latest institution to join the UK’s National Nuclear User Facility (NNUF). The NNUF project is a Government investment in the UK’s nuclear future, providing state-of-the-art experimental facilities for research and development in nuclear science and technology. NNUF was launched in March 2013 and new facilities have been created by two calls; the most recent in July 2020. More details on NNUF can be found at https://www.nnuf.ac.uk/home.

Prof. Bruce Hanson, working with Prof. Mike Fairweather, Dr Tim Hunter, Dr David Harbottle, Dr Marco Colombo and Prof Jeff Peakall in SoEE, successfully won £2,86M (£3M FEC) funding to build a multiphase fluid flow facility in the latest call for proposals. MUFFIN (MUltiphase Fluid Flow In Nuclear systems) will be a facility based at the University of Leeds in the School of Chemical and Process Engineering with the dedicated aim to enable world class research on multiphase fluid flow, at a scale that is representative of a real system.

What does real mean?

Water, acid, solids (materials), steel pipes, with flanges/joints and in bends (environment), pipe sizes comparable with plant (scale)

MUFFIN consists of three components:

  1. A bank of high precision, state of art, instruments for measuring a wide range of fluid flow properties that can be employed in a water and/or molten chloride system.
  2. A pilot scale test bed, based on water [pressure (=<5atm), temperature (=<100oC)].
  3. A pilot scale test bed, based on molten chloride [pressure (=<5atm), temperature (=<600oC)],

Both test beds can be reconfigured to include specialist instrumentation for fluid flow measurements and/or used to develop new instruments and equipment.

The design and build of the facility will start in October 2021 with the aim to have a fully working facility, ready for research, in the Autumn of 2023. As a NNUF Hub, MUFFIN will be open to users from any university in the UK. If you want to know more about what we can offer and how MUFFIN will be able to support your research, please contact Prof. Bruce Hanson (b.c.hanson@leeds.ac.uk).