Scalability of the natural convection shutdown heat removal test facility (NSTF) data to VHTR/NGNP RCCS designs.

Abstract

Passive safety in the Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) is strongly dependent on the thermal performance of the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS). Scaled experiments performed in the Natural Shutdown Test Facility (NSTF) are to provide data for assessing and/or improving computer code models for RCCS phenomena. Design studies and safety analyses that are to support licensing of the VHTR will rely on these models to achieve a high degree of certainty in predicted design heat removal rate. To guide in the selection and development of an appropriate set of experiments a scaling analysis has been performed for the air-cooled RCCS option. The goals were to (1) determine the phenomena that dominate the behavior of the RCCS, (2) determine the general conditions that must be met so that these phenomena and their relative importance are preserved in the experiments, (3) identify constraints specific to the NSTF that potentially might prevent exact similitude, and (4) then to indicate how the experiments can be scaled to prevent distortions in the phenomena of interest. The phenomena identified as important to RCCS operation were also the subject of a recent PIRT study. That work and the present work collectively indicate that the main phenomena influencing RCCS heat removal capability are (1) radiation heat transport from the vessel to the air ducts, (2) the integral effects of momentum and heat transfer in the air duct, (3) buoyancy at the wall inside the air duct giving rise to mixed convection, and (4) multidimensional effects inside the air duct caused by non-uniform circumferential heat flux and non-circular geometry.