Design of a natural draft air-cooled condenser and its heat transfer characteristics in the passive residual heat removal system for 10 MW molten salt reactor experiment

Abstract

As one of the Generation IV reactors, Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) has its superiorities in satisfying the requirements on safety. In order to improve its inherent safety, a concept of passive residual heat removal system (PRHRS) for the 10 MW Molten Salt Reactor Experiment (MSRE) was put forward, which mainly consisted of a fuel drain tank, a feed water tank and a natural draft air-cooled condenser (NDACC). Besides, several valves and pipes are also included in the PRHRS. A NDACC for the PRHRS was preliminarily designed in this paper, which contained a finned tube bundle and a chimney. The tube bundle was installed at the bottom of the chimney for increasing the velocity of the air across the bundle. The heat transfer characteristics of the NDACC were investigated by developing a model of the PRHRS using C++ code. The effects of the environmental temperature, finned tube number and chimney height on heat removal capacity of the NDACC were analyzed. The results show that it has sufficient heat removal capacity to meet the requirements of the residual heat removal for MSRE. The effects of these three factors are obvious. With the decay heat reducing, the heat dissipation power declines after a short-time rise in the beginning. The operation of the NDACC is completely automatic without the need of any external power, resulting in a high safety and reliability of the reactor, especially once the accident of power lost occurs to the power plant.