High heat flux cooling of accelerator targets with micro-channels

Accelerator targets, both for radioisotope production and for neutron sources generate very high thermal density in the target material, which absorbs the particles beam. Total power is in the order of 10–100 kW. Generally, the geometric size of the targets is very small so the heat flux is high. The design of these targets requires efficient heat removal techniques in order to preserve the integrity of the target. The average heat fluxes from these targets can be up to 1 kW/cm2. Few techniques exist to deal with such high heat fluxes. One of them is mini- or micro-channels heat exchanger. In order to evaluate the performance of mini- and micro-channels heat exchangers for high heat flux cooling, experimental cooling loop has been designed and built at Soreq. Initial experiments have been preformed. These experiments demonstrated a cooling capacity over 1 kW/cm2. This cooling capacity can be obtained with relatively little cost as compared to results of earlier studies.