Abstract
The supercritical water-cooled reactor (SCWR) is a concept for an advanced reactor that operates at supercritical pressure and temperature. However, near the pseudocritical region the coolant properties are very sensitive to temperature, which raises concern about flow instabilities, whose analysis is very important to ensure safety of SCWR. Existence and nature of instabilities can be investigated numerically, using commercial system codes based on one-dimensional unsteady equations, suitable equations of state for thermo-physical properties of supercritical water, and suitable correlations for hydraulic resistance and heat transfer in supercritical fluids. In the present work, numerical investigation of stability characteristics of heated parallel channel system carrying supercritical water has been carried out using the RELAP5 code. The inlet and outlet pressures, the inlet temperature, and the heat flux were specified as the boundary conditions. The numerical model was validated with the help of experimental results reported in the literature. Transient numerical simulations were carried out to study the effect of various operating parameters (e.g., the mass flow rate, the inlet temperature, and the heat flux). The trends obtained were similar to those reported in the literature, albeit the asymmetry was less pronounced due to higher system pressure.
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