Density of chloride molten salts is an essential physical property in the reactor core design and thermal-hydraulic design simulation, especially in molten salt reactor (MSR) design currently under development in Korea. NaCl-MgCl2-UCl3 pseudo-ternary system is one of the various candidate chloride-based salt mixtures because it has relatively-low melting point, very low vapor pressure, high thermal conductivity, etc. However, to the best of our knowledge, the density data of NaCl-MgCl2- UCl3 have not yet been measured or published worldwide, and therefore the ballpark figures of the density should be given for the preliminary reactor design. In our present study, the density estimation of NaCl-MgCl2-UCl3 based on the pseudo-binary data, i.e., NaCl-MgCl2, MgCl2-UCl3, and NaCl- UCl3, reported in the literature previously were performed using the Redlich-Kister model. Binary interaction parameter for MgCl2-UCl3 was higher than that for NaCl-MgCl2 and lower than that for NaCl-UCl3. As an example, calculated density of 0.62 NaCl: 0.18 MgCl2: 0.20 UCl3 at 873 K was 2.578 g·cm−3. In our further study, the methodology using Redlich-Kister model will be applied to more complex multicomponent systems and to other physical properties such as viscosity, thermal conductivity, surface tension, etc.

Rapid, simple, and sensitive detection of pathogen bacteria is a highly topical research area due to increasingly concerning of food safety and public health. Surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) is a promising and attractive technique offering fast, sensitive, comparatively low-cost, and in-suit detection of pathogenic bacteria. However, this technique requires the preparation step for reducing the noise derived from heterogeneous matrixes of food sample. Immunomagnetic separation (IMS) is widely used technique enabling separation and concentration of the target analyte. It can be used not only laboratory scale but also field diagnosis easily. Here, we synthesized gold-shelled starch magnetic microparticles (GS@SMMPs) for effective separation and concentration of Escherichia coli O157:H7, which were subsequently subjected to SERS integrated with gold-coated 3D-well substrate for bacterial detection in aqueous solution. GS@SMMPs were labelled by Anti-E. coli O157 monoclonal antibody through gold binding protein and staphylococcal protein G (GBP-SPG) fusion protein. In IMS experiment, the immuno-GS@SMMPs showed high capture efficiency over 90% to E. coli O157:H7, which resulted in 10 times decrease in detection limit in PCR assay. Through SERS assay, E. coli O157:H7 concentrated by immuno-GS@SMMPs were successfully detected even at an extremely low concentration of 101 CFU/ml the subjected to SERS. Moreover, by using sandwich method using SERS reporter consisting of GBP-SPG, we found that E. coli O157:H7 were able to be detected by SERS quantitatively through measuring the SERS intensity of GBP-SPG. This novel strategy combining SERS and IMS could be meaningful for extending the application in SERS for in-suit sensitive detection of pathogenic bacteria.