Experimental study on boiling two-phase of liquid sodium along a 7-rod bundle – Part Ⅱ: Heat transfer characteristics

Abstract

Sodium boiling will occur in some hypothetical accident cases (such as additional reactivity introduction and heat discharge capacity deterioration, and Local fault propagation). Thus sodium boiling experiments are necessary for the safety analysis and the development of serious accident programs in sodium-cooled fast reactors. In the present study, the boiling two-phase heat transfer experiments of liquid sodium were carried out on the boiling liquid sodium test loop. The experimental results showed that the entire boiling process can be divided into four stages. The heat transfer coefficient of the boiling two phases in the rod bundle channel increases gradually with the increase of heat flux and grows very slowly with the increase of system pressure. Based on the 54 groups of rod channels obtained, the new correlation of transfer heat coefficient of boiling two-phase liquid sodium was developed in a 7-rod bundle. The new correlation can well predict the experimental data of boiling two-phase liquid sodium obtained by other scholars, and the prediction error is within ±50\\%. Finally, mean relative deviation (MRD), absolute mean relative deviation (MARD), and root mean square deviation (RMSRD) were introduced to evaluate the accuracy of the correlation quantitatively.