Natural air convection cooling for advanced reactor containments

Conference · Mon Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 1997

OSTI ID:549086

Cheng, X; Erbacher, F J; Neitzel, H J ^[1]

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1. Institute for Applied Thermo- and Fluiddynamics, Karlsruhe (Germany)

The use of passive safety features in a nuclear power plant is a desirable method of achieving simplification, increasing the reliability of the performance of essential safety functions and promoting an improved public acceptance of nuclear energy. The Research Center Karlsruhe (FZK), in cooperation with the Technical University Karlsruhe, has proposed a new containment concept for future pressurized water reactors. It pursues the goal to restrict the consequences of severe core meltdown accidents to the reactor plant without any noticeable release of radioactivity impairing the public. One essential of this concept is the decay heat removal from the containment by natural air convection and thermal radiation in a passive way. To determine the coolability of such a passive cooling system and to study the physical phenomena involved, experimental separate-effects investigations are performed in the PASCO test facility which is a one-sided heated rectangular channel. In addition numerical calculations are performed by using the 3-D code FLUTAN. The present experimental and analytical research work has shown that the passive containment cooling in natural air convection coupled with thermal radiation is a promising concept. At intermediate and high wall emissivities thermal radiation contributes significantly to the total heat transfer by natural air convection, even at low temperatures of the heated wall. The tests performed have generated a broad and detailed data base for the development of physical models and for the validation of computer codes. 8 refs., 9 figs., 2 tabs.

• OSTI ID: 549086
• Report Number(s): CONF-970607--Vol.1; CNN: Grant 15NU 0961
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
AFTER-HEAT REMOVAL
MELTDOWN
NATURAL CONVECTION
PWR TYPE REACTORS
REACTOR COOLING SYSTEMS
REACTOR SAFETY
REACTOR SAFETY EXPERIMENTS
THERMAL RADIATION