Study on the Heat Transfer in the Water Pool Type Reactor Cavity Cooling System of the Very High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor

In the HTGR (High Temperature Gas Cooled Reactor), the Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS) is equipped to remove the heat transferred from the reactor vessel to the structure of the containment. The function of the RCCS is to dissipate the heat from the reactor cavity during normal operation including shutdown. The system also removes the decay heat during the loss of forced convection (LOFC) accident. A new concept of the water pool type RCCS was proposed at Seoul National University. The system mainly consists of two parts, water pool located between the containment and reactor vessel and five trains of air cooling system installed in the water pool. In normal operations, the heat loss from the reactor vessel is transferred into the water pool via cavity and it is removed by the forced convection of air flowing through the cooling pipes. During the LOFC accident, the after heat is passively removed by the water tank without the forced convection of air and the RCCS water pool is designed to provide sufficient passive cooling capacity of the after heat removal for three days. In the present study, experiments and numerical calculations using CFX5.7 for the water pool and cooling pipe were performed to investigate the heat transfer characteristics and evaluate the heat transfer coefficient model of the MARS-GCR (Multi-dimensional Analysis of Reactor Safety for Gas Cooled Reactor Analysis) which was developed for the safety analysis of the gas cooled reactor. From the results of the experiments and CFX calculations, heat transfer coefficients inside the cooling pipe were calculated and those were used for the assessment for the heat transfer coefficient model of the MARS-GCR.