Evaluation of correlations for prediction of onset of heat transfer deterioration for vertically upward flow of supercritical water in pipe

Abstract

Supercritical water has great potential as a coolant for nuclear reactor. Its use will lead to higher thermal efficiency of Rankine cycle. However, in certain conditions heat transfer may get deteriorated which may lead to undesirable high clad surface temperature. It is necessary to estimate the operating conditions in which heat transfer deterioration (HTD) will take place, so as to establish thermal margins for safe reactor operation. In the present work, the heat flux corresponding to onset of HTD for vertically upward flow of supercritical water in a pipe is obtained over a wide range of system parameters, namely pressure, mass flux, and pipe diameter. This is done by performing large number of simulations using an in-house CFD code, which is especially developed and validated for this purpose. The identification of HTD is based on observance of one or more peak/s in the computed wall temperature profile. The existing correlations for predicting the onset of HTD are compared against the results obtained by present simulations as well as available sets of experimental data. It is found that the prediction accuracy of the correlation proposed by Dongliang et al. is best among the existing correlations.