Thermalhydraulic Investigation Using a Test Facility Simulating 200 MW Integral Heating Reactor

Abstract

Since the middle of 1980's, a research program on heating reactor has been carried out at Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua University in China, the heating reactor is a light water cooled, integral type natural circulation reactor with low system pressure and low core exit quality, it has the passive safety features and other advanced characteristics of the next generation reactors. Because of a relatively long riser and low system pressure, a small quality perturbation at the exit of the core will lead to a relatively large variation of void fraction in the riser, so will the driving force. All of the above features made it very different from the typical PWRs and BWRs. In order to guarantee the safe operation of the heating reactor, a full scale test loop HRTL-200, simulating HR-200 heating reactors in main geometry and operation parameters, was constructed and operated under the broad test conditions covering the 200 MW heating reactor operation conditions at INET. The HRTL-200 test facility, some of steady-state and two-phase flow instability test results from the test facility and the consideration how to choose the optimal design parameters for the heating reactors are shown in this paper. The range of experimentally studied parameters are: the system pressure is from 1.0 to 4.0 MPa, the largest heat flux is about 50 W/cm2, and the quality at the exit of the test section is less than 6%.