Validation Experiment for the Cooling Capability of Passive Auxiliary Feedwater System (PAFS) With PASCAL Facility

Abstract

The Passive Auxiliary Feedwater System (PAFS) is one of the advanced safety features adopted in the APR+ (Advanced Power Reactor Plus) which is intended to completely replace the conventional active auxiliary feedwater system. It removes the decay heat by cooling down the secondary system of the SG using condensation heat exchanger installed in the Passive Condensation Cooling Tank (PCCT). With an aim of validating the cooling and operational performance of the PAFS, PASCAL (PAFS Condensing Heat Removal Assessment Loop), was constructed to experimentally investigate the condensation heat transfer and natural convection phenomena in the PAFS. It simulates a single tube of the passive condensation heat exchangers, a steam-supply line, a return-water line, and a PCCT with a reduced area, which is equivalent to 1/240 of the prototype according to a volumetric scaling methodology with a full height. The objective of the experiment is to investigate the cooling performance and natural circulation characteristics of the PAFS by simulating a steady state condition of the thermal power. From the experiment, two-phase flow phenomena in the horizontal heat exchanger and PCCT were investigated and the cooling capability of the condensation heat exchanger was validated. Test results showed that the design of the condensation heat exchanger in PAFS could satisfy the requirement for heat removal rate of 540 kW per a single tube and the prevention of water hammer phenomenon inside the tube. It also proved that the operation of PAFS played an important role in cooling down the decay heat by natural convection without any active system. The present experimental results will contribute to improve the model of the condensation and boiling heat transfer, and also to provide the benchmark data for validating the calculation performance of a thermal hydraulic system analysis code with respect to the PAFS.