Investigation of Liquid Sodium Containing Suspended Metallic Nanoparticles

Ohira, Hiroaki; Ara, Kuniaki 

In order to investigate the dispersion behavior of metallic nano-particles into liquid sodium and to evaluate the chemical reactivity with water, the dispersion experiments and the water-sodium reaction experiments were carried out by changing the production method of the metallic particles and the metal elements. The following results were obtained from these experiments:1) Sodium D lines were observed from all the nano-fluid vapor and the metals of the nano-particles were detected in the vapor. From these results, it was estimated that the small-sized nano-particles combined with sodium atoms to form complexes and dispersed stably in the sodium.2) The oxide surface layers of the metallic nano-particles produced by condensing the vapor were observed to be negligibly thin compared with the particles produced by a chemical synthesis technique. It was also estimated that the smaller and the uniform sized particles were also produced by advansing the condensing technique.3) Although the temperature changes by the water-nanofluid reactions were in the same levels with those by the water-sodium reactions, the pressure gradients by the water-nanofluid reactions showed smaller values than those by the water-sodium reactions: These results indicated the possibility to reduce the chemical reactivity of the nano-fluids.From above results, we are going to evaluate the chemical reaction by applying the smaller-sized nano-particles in the next experiments.