Heat Transfer in a Vertical 7-Element Bundle Cooled With Supercritical FREON-12

Abstract

Currently, SuperCritical Water-cooled nuclear Reactor (SCWR) concepts are being developed worldwide with an objective to increase thermal efficiencies of future Nuclear Power Plants (NNPs) on 10 - 15% compared to those of current water-cooled NPPs. With such an increase in the thermal efficiencies, SCW NPPs will be at the current level of the most advanced thermal power plants: coal-fired SCW NPPs and combined-cycle gas-fired NPPs. However, to be able to develop SCWRs at least several key technical problems should be resolved. One of these problems is limited amount of experimental data on heat transfer in fuel bundles and based on that SCW heat-transfer correlations.Experiments in SCW are very complicated and expensive due to high critical parameters of water (pressure 22.064 MPa and temperature 374.95 degrees C). Moreover, there are only few SCW test rigs, which capable to perform experiments in full-scale bundles. As a preliminary approach supercritical-pressure heat-transfer experiments in bundles can be performed in modeling fluids such as Freons or carbon dioxide.Therefore, a set of experimental data was obtained in Freon-12-cooled bundle simulator at the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering (IPPE, Obninsk, Russia). A vertical 7-element bundle was installed in a hexagonal flow channel. The test section consisted of elements that were 9.5 mm in diameter with the total heated length of 1 m. Bulk-fluid and wall temperature profiles were recorded using thermocouples. Several heat-transfer regimes were tested. Also, this paper references thermophysical properties of supercritical Freon-12 at the critical pressure (4.1361 MPa) and test pressure of 4.65 MPa.