Two-Phase Flow in Wire-Packed Bed.

Abstract

For the establishment of liquid metal cooled fast breeder reactors (LMFBRs) as commercial reactors, one of the most important tasks is to develop highly reliable heat transfer tubes for steam generators (SGs) used in LMFBRs because their failure could lead to a potentially explosive sodium/water reaction. The authors proposed a new concept of a wire-packed duplex tube in order to improve stress concentration after its bending, thermal stress and so on against the contact type duplex tubes and knitted wire-packed duplex tubes which had been proposed. In this paper, two-phase flow in wire-packed beds, which simulate the wire-packed layer of the proposed duplex tubes, is experimentally investigated using air and water as test fluids in order to obtain a fundamental data base for a water-leakage detection method using absolute pressure and differential pressure measurements. The measured pressure drops are analyzed by using the following analytical models; (1) homogeneous flow model, (2) channeling model and ...