Electrical power degradation from the operation of many series-parallel circuited cesium diodes in a thermionic reactor must be considered when a nonflattened nuclear power distribution exists over the volume of the reactor core. This experiment measures the loss of power and efficiency due to unequal heat inputs to series- or parallel-connected diodes, and studies the operating characteristics of a multiple-diode system. The results are applied to a specific thermionic reactor configuration with a ratio of maximum to minimum diode heat input of 1.85. The minimum degradation of power and efficiency was found to be 41 and 19%, respectively, at optimized operating conditions.
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