Plate heat exchanger – inertia flywheel performance in loss of flow transient

Abstract

Abstract One of the most versatile types of heat exchangers used is the plate heat exchanger. It has principal advantages over other heat exchangers in that plates can be added and/or removed easily in order to change the area available for heat transfer and therefore its overall performance. The cooling systems of Egypt's second research reactor (ETRR 2) use this type of heat exchanger for cooling purposes in its primary core cooling and pool cooling systems. In addition to the change in the number of heat exchanger cooling channels, the effect of changing the amount of mass flow rate on the heat exchanger performance is an important issues in this study. The inertia flywheel mounted on the primary core cooling system pump with the plate heat exchanger plays an important role in the case of loss of flow transients. The PARET code is used to simulate the effect of loss of flow transients on the reactor core. Hence, the core outlet temperature with the pump-flywheel flow coast down is fed into the plate heat exchanger model developed to estimate the total energy transferred to the cooling tower, the primary side heat exchanger temperature variation, the transmitted heat exchanger power, and the heat exchanger effectiveness. In addition, the pressure drop in both, the primary side and secondary side of the plate heat exchanger is calculated in all simulated transients because their values have limits beyond which the heat exchanger is useless.