Reactor & Heat Transport System Normal Operation: Heat Transfer Fundamentals
A technical course on how heat moves through a nuclear reactor's fuel and coolant, from the basics of thermodynamics to predicting what happens when flow drops, pressure falls, or power rises.
About this course
Most people who work around nuclear reactors can describe what happens during normal operation. Fewer can explain why it happens. This course closes that gap. It starts with the physics that everything else in reactor thermal hydraulics depends on: what heat actually is, how it moves through solids and fluids, and the equations that connect power, flow, and temperature. From there, it builds toward the things that matter operationally.
The center of the course is the boiling regimes. As heat flux increases across a fuel element, the coolant doesn't just get hotter in a straight line. It passes through five distinct modes of heat transfer, each with different effectiveness, and one of them represents a collapse in cooling that can damage fuel. Understanding why that collapse happens, what critical heat flux means, and how dryout develops in a two-phase channel is the kind of knowledge that turns a procedure-follower into someone who actually understands what the limits are protecting against.
The course finishes by connecting all of it to real system changes: what the temperature and enthalpy profiles look like when coolant flow drops, when pressure falls, when inlet temperature rises, or when reactor power increases. By the end, you won't just know the definitions. You'll be able to read a set of conditions and predict what the fuel and coolant are doing, and why the operating limits exist where they do.
Details
Skills you'll learn
Heat Transfer Calculation
Apply the conduction, convection, and energy equations to calculate heat transfer rates and channel power in both single-phase and two-phase flow conditions.
Boiling Regime Analysis
Identify the five fuel-cooling regimes by their physical characteristics and explain why heat transfer effectiveness changes across each one.
Critical Heat Flux Reasoning
Define CHF and critical channel power, explain what dryout means physically, and describe the conditions that push a channel toward that limit.
Temperature Profile Interpretation
Explain the shape of the temperature curve from fuel centreline to coolant and predict how it shifts with changes in power, flow, or the onset of boiling.
System Response Prediction
Predict how temperature-enthalpy and heat-flux profiles change in response to reduced flow, reduced pressure, higher inlet temperature, or increased reactor power.
Syllabus
6 units • 12 lessons • 6 assessments
Learning activities
Every lesson gives you several ways to learn.
Frequently asked questions
