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Experimental Flow Instability Study of a Natural Circulation Loop with Supercritical CO2

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Proceedings of The 20th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference (PBNC 2016)

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Abstract

Flow instabilities of a natural circulation loop were experimentally studied with supercritical CO2 as the working fluid. The experimental loop is a rectangular loop with single horizontal heated channel locating on the bottom of a rectangular loop. Parameters such as system pressure, inlet temperature, and outlet throttling effects’ on both steady state and flow instabilities were studied. Results show that the increase in system pressure would shift the peak mass flow rate to the right side of flow-power map and stabilize the system. The increase in outlet throttling caused the opposite effect. The instability boundary did not change much within the given test range of inlet temperature. Instabilities were found when the outlet temperature of the heating section went far beyond the pseudo-critical temperature. All the instability points were located on the negative slope of flow-power curve. One of the interesting findings was that the instability will disappear when the accumulator is isolated from the main loop. Numerical studies were also conducted with both the SPORTS and CATHENA codes to model the experimental results. Results show that the CATHENA code is capable of predicting flow instabilities in natural circulation loop at supercritical pressures. A new method of converting the CO2 results to H2O results is proposed by making use of the dimensionless Fr-N tpc map, and the method is verified numerically.

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Abbreviations

M :

Mass flow rate (kg/s)

P :

System pressure (MPa)

T :

Temperature (°C)

K :

Local loss coefficient

C p :

Specific heat at constant pressure (J/(kg ºC))

Q :

Heating power (kW)

H :

Loop height (m)

N spc :

Sub-pseudocritical number

N tpc :

Trans-pseudocritical number

Fr:

Froude number

h :

Fluid specific enthalpy (J/kg)

w :

Velocity (m/s)

g :

Gravitational acceleration (m2/s)

β :

Isobaric thermal expansion coefficient (K−1)

c:

Critical

pc:

Pseudo-critical

p:

Constant pressure

in:

Inlet of heated channel

out:

Outlet of heated channel

channel:

Heated channel

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Acknowledgments

This work is financially supported by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited (AECL). The first author is also grateful to Sviatoslaw Karnaoukh for technical support of the experiment as well as Dr. Aleksandar Vasic, Dr. Thomas Beuthe, and Dr. Tong Liu at Canadian Nuclear Laboratories who provided invaluable guidance and support about the CATHENA code.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada

    Lei Zhang, Vijay Chatoorgoon & Robert Derksen

Authors
  1. Lei Zhang
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  2. Vijay Chatoorgoon
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  3. Robert Derksen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Vijay Chatoorgoon .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. China Nuclear Power Engineering Co., Ltd , Beijing, Beijing, China

    Hong Jiang

Appendix A.1

Appendix A.1

The shell and tube heat exchanger consists of 127 horizontal parallel small tubes (Φ3.175 × 0.3175 mm) with a length of 0.414 m. The supercritical CO2 flows inside the small tubes and outside the small tubes are coolant water. An equally distributed of K = 8.1 for heat exchanger part was adopted for all numerical cases. The inlet K factor K in was kept to be 0 for both experiments and numerical study. The outlet K factor K out was changed based on the throttling of outlet valve in experimental cases. Other K factors are left unchanged during numerical simulation and listed in Table 5 (Fig. 15 and Table 4)

Table 4 Dimensions of simplified experimental loop
Full size table
Table 5 Local K factors used for numerical simulation of simplified experimental loop
Full size table

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Fig. 15
figure 15

Simplification of experimental loop

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Zhang, L., Chatoorgoon, V., Derksen, R. (2017). Experimental Flow Instability Study of a Natural Circulation Loop with Supercritical CO2 . In: Jiang, H. (eds) Proceedings of The 20th Pacific Basin Nuclear Conference. PBNC 2016. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2314-9_10

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-2314-9_10

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Singapore

  • Print ISBN: 978-981-10-2313-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-10-2314-9

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