Investigations on boiling heat transfer characteristics in non-uniform heating U-Tube bundles under rolling motion

Abstract

The development of the marine environment necessitates more rapid development of marine nuclear power plants, and the U-tube bundle heat exchangers, which exist in marine nuclear power plants, play a significant role in safety and economy. However, the radial non-uniform heating (NUH) brought on by the specific structure of the U-tube complicates the boiling heat transfer characteristics. Additionally, the environment of ocean rolling motion superimposed with NUH makes heat transfer more complex. The paper analyzes the time-averaged and transient heat transfer performance by contrasting the rolling UH experiments and rolling NUH experiments. The result demonstrates that the addition of NUH causes no impact on the influenced degree of rolling motion on the time-averaged temperature characteristics, which means a weakly coupled action of NUH and rolling motion. Based on the independence principle, considering the influencing factor of rolling motion and NUH, the developed correlation for calculating time-averaged heat transfer coefficient (HTC) can capture 96.67% of the experimental data within 15% of the error line, and the average absolute error is about 5.75%. For instantaneous fluctuated characteristics, the addition of NUH has a greater impact on the fluctuated range of water temperature than that of the wall temperature, and the fluctuation introduced by rolling motion is displayed based on the effect of NUH. Besides, the calculating method for determining the HTC fluctuation amplitude under uniform heating and rolling motion conditions also applies to situations in which NUH and rolling motion coexist, and the mean absolute error is around 13.80%, indicating that the coupled action of NUH and rolling motion is less obvious in forced circulation. The fluctuation amplitude of HTC depends more on the thermal parameters and rolling parameters. Finally, a novel computational logic approach was created and proposed to estimate transient HTC under conditions for NUH and rolling motion, which can anticipate the fluctuated amplitude and period of instantaneous HTC under corresponding conditions.