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A Heuristic for Designing Hybrid Compact Heat Exchangers for Nuclear Applications


 Hybrid compact heat exchangers (HCHEs) are a potential source of innovation for intermediate heat exchangers in nuclear industry, with HCHEs being designed for Gen-IV nuclear power applications. Compact heat exchangers are commonly fabricated using diffusion bonding, which can provide challenges for HCHEs due to resultant non-uniform stress distributions across hybrid structures during bonding, leading to variations in joint properties that can compromise performance and safety. In this paper, we introduce and evaluate a heuristic for determining whether a feasible set of diffusion bonding conditions exist for producing HCHE designs capable of meeting regulatory requirements under nuclear boiler and pressure vessel codes. A diffusion bonding model for predicting pore elimination and structural analyses are used to inform the heuristic and a heat exchanger design for 316 stainless steel is used to evaluate the efficacy of the heuristic to develop acceptable diffusion bonding parameters. A set of diffusion bonding conditions were identified and validated experimentally by producing various test coupons for evaluating bond strength, ductility, porosity, grain size, creep rupture, creep fatigue and channel deviation. A five-layer hybrid compact heat exchanger structure was fabricated and tensile tested demonstrating that the bonding parameters satisfy all criteria in this paper for diffusion bonding HCHEs with application to the nuclear industry.