Increased reliance on passive emergency cooling using natural circulation of gas at elevated pressure is one of the major goals for the Gas-cooled Fast Reactor (GFR). Since GFR cores have high power density and low thermal inertia, the decay heat removal (DHR) in depressurization accidents is a key challenge. Furthermore, due to its high surface heat flux and low velocities under natural circulation in any post-LOCA scenario, three effects impair the capability of turbulent gas flow to remove heat from the GFR core, namely: (1) Acceleration effect (2) Buoyancy effect (3) Properties variation. This paper reviews previous work on heat transfer mechanisms and flow characteristics of the Deteriorated Turbulent Heat Transfer (DTHT) regime. It is shown that the GFR’s DHR system has a potential for operating in the DTHT regime by performing a simple analysis. A description of the MIT/INL experimental facility designed and built to investigate the DTHT regime is provided together with the first test results. The first runs were performed in the forced convection regime to verify facility operation against well-established forced convection correlations. The results of the three runs at Reynolds numbers 6700, 8000 and 12800 showed good agreement with the Gnielinsky correlation [4], which is considered the best available heat transfer correlation in the forced convection regime and is valid for a large range of Reynolds and Prandtl numbers. However, even in the forced convection regime, the effect of heat transfer properties variation of the fluid was found to be still significant.
An experimental study on natural circulation decay heat removal system for a loop type fast reactor
