M.Sc. Alexander Hacks

„supercritical CO₂ heat removal system (sCO2 – HeRo)” – Research and Innovation project funded by the Horizon 2020 Framework Programme of the European Commission under grant agreement No. 662116.

„Supercritical CO2 cycle for flexible and sustainable support to the electricity system (sCO2-Flex)” – European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No. 764690.

„Innovative sCO2-based heat removal technology for an increased level of safety of nuclear power plants (sCO2-4-NPP)” – Euratom research and training programme 2014-2018 under grant agreement No. 847606.

The „Supercritical CO2 Heat Removal System“ (sCO2-HeRo) was developed as a reliable, efficient and secure system to remove residual decay heat from a nuclear core. Since the residual decay heat  powers the system directly, it is independent of external power supply. Therefore it is an excellent emergency system in case of a “Station Blackout” or other emergency cases in an nuclear power plant (NPP). The system (turbomachine and heat exchangers) is compact and thus retrofittable to existing NPP due to the use of supercritical CO2 (sCO2) as working fluid. While the system was developed in the sCO2-HeRo project, the follow up project (sCO2-4-NPP) continues to prove operability of the system at experimental scale and also design the system for NPP-scale. Finally the system is implemented in a simulator of a NPP to reach TRL 5.

Development of the turbomachine for the sCO2-HeRo system and experimental analysis of the sCO2 cycle and turbomachine. Besides designing, building and commissioning of the turbomachine for the sCO2-cycle the actual work focusses on validation of the system at experimental scale by integrating the turbomachine in the cycle and running experiments to verify that the components and cycle behave as expected and to improve the system (e.g. by implementing magnetic bearings operating in sCO2 in the turbomachine). Further, the measurements are provided to national and international project partners (http://www.sco2-hero.eu/ & https://www.sco2-4-npp.eu/) to validate thermohydraulic system codes for designing the system in NPP-scale.

The work also includes the management of the experiments and development of the turbomachine for NPP-scale together with national and international project partners.

• (Remote) practical exercise for the lecture „Wärmekraftmaschinen und Arbeitsmaschinen“
• Organisation and supervision of „The European sCO2 Conference for Energy Systems” (Conftool, Whova)