Precision measurements in nuclear β ‐decay with LPCTrap
The experimental achievements and the current program with the LPCTrap device installed at the LIRAT beam line of the SPIRAL1‐GANIL facility are presented. The device is dedicated to the study of the weak interaction at low energy by means of precise measurements of the β−ν angular correlation parameter. Technical aspects as well as the main results are reviewed. The future program with new available beams is briefly discussed.
Precise measurement of the angular correlation parameter aβν in the β decay of 35Ar with LPCTrap
Precise measurements in the β decay of the 35 Ar nucleus enable to search for deviations from the Standard Model (SM) in the weak sector. These measurements enable either to check the CKM matrix unitarity or to constrain the existence of exotic currents rejected in the V-A theory of the SM. For this purpose, the β -ν angular correlation parameter, a βν , is inferred from a comparison between experimental and simulated recoil ion time-of-flight distributions following the quasi-pure Fermi transition of 35 Ar1+ ions confined in the transparent Paul trap of the LPCTrap device at GANIL. During the last experiment, 1.5×106 good events have been collected, which corresponds to an expected precision of less than 0.5% on the a βν value. The required simulation is divided between the use of massive GPU parallelization and the GEANT4 toolkit for the source-cloud kinematics and the tracking of the decay products.
Quantitative and qualitative relationship between swirl burner operatingconditions and pulverized coal flame length
Abstract Currently, there are used in power plants two types of burners to combustion the pulverized coal: jet burners and swirl burners. Most of the published works in the field of analysis of burners operating conditions are related to jet burners and are limited to initial region of the flame at the outlet of the burner. For jet burners an offset between the burner outlet and the flame beginning point could be analyzed. In the case of swirl burners with the pre-mixing diffuser chamber an offset between flame ignition point and burner outlet is usually not visible. Because already in the pre-mixing diffuser chamber of swirl burner occurs the ignition of coal-dust together with oxidant-gas cloud and thereby the formation of the flame. Therefore, the analysis of operating conditions for this types of burners requires a different approach. There is a lack of researches, in which will be analyzed changes of the flame length, that are caused by changes of design and operating parameters of swirl burner with the pre-mixing diffuser chamber. Therefore the aim of this study was to implement and verify the methodology for estimating the flame length, which will allow monitoring changes of operating conditions, that are caused by changes of design and operating parameters of swirl burner with the pre-mixing diffuser chamber. To carry out the analysis of the image of the coal flame, the two algorithms have been presented. This two algorithms, being based on the video images of the coal flame allows to specify and detect the end point of the flame and on that basis the length of the flame, as well as the fluctuation changes of flame length can be later determined. Both, the change thermal loads of coal burner, streams of secondary air, as well as the constructional change of the angle of swirler assemblies, resulted in distinct changes in the length of the pulverized coal flame.