loss to the vacuum vessel. The diameter and the length of the vessel are 530 mm and 2600 mm respectively. Water cooling pipes are soldered on the outer surface of the vessel. Experimental procedure The vacuum vessel was evacuated down to 10’3 Pa. The working fluid was supplied from the Cycle Simulation Test Facility [12]. The working fluid was a mixture of 28.2 vol% of xenon in helium. Flow rate of the working fluid was 130 kg/h in the Cycle Simulation Test Facility. The fluid flow was divided into the two model storage units, then the working fluid flows through each model storage unit with half of the flow rate, i.e. 65 kg/h. Electrical input into each part of the heaters was increased gradually. The electrical input was controlled to keep the rate of temperature increase below of 500 K/h at surfaces of the model storage units in order to avoid fracture of the canisters by thermal stress. There were two modes in the experiments, namely charge and discharge modes. The charge mode simulated a sunshine period on space stations. The discharge mode simulated an eclipse period. These modes were repeated alternatively several times. At the end of the charge mode, the outlet temperature of the working fluid was nearly constant. On the other hand, at the end of the discharge mode, all of the LiF froze in the model storage units. Two kinds of heating distribution were supplied in the charge mode, i.e. uniform and non uniform heating. The latter simulated the heating distribution in an actual receiver [13,14], The non uniform heating distribution is shown in Figure 6.
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