Researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge, Brookhaven and Idaho national laboratories and Stony Brook University have developed a novel approach to gain fundamental insights into molten salts, a heat transfer medium important to advanced energy technologies.

Molten salts, or salt melts, remain liquid across a range of temperatures and offer stable thermal and conductive properties for some of the hottest applications. They can fuel and cool nuclear reactors, power high-temperature batteries and store energy for concentrated solar power plants. An experiment decades ago demonstrated their potential to produce safe, efficient and affordable nuclear energy.

“There has been renewed interest in using molten salts to address current energy challenges, but we need a better fundamental understanding of salts and their interactions with structural materials to develop technologies around them,” said ORNL’s Vyacheslav Bryantsev. “By combining theory and experiment, we can create useful models that connect with the many physical properties engineers need to consider when they design molten salt systems.”

The team collaborated as part of a DOE Energy Frontier Research Center that investigates Molten Salts in Extreme Environments.

Results published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society provide elusive information about the structure and dynamics of molten salts and their interactions with the alloys used to contain them.