Thermal Performance of Vertical Rectangular Channel Inserting Copper Wire With High Porosity

In the Very-High-Temperature Reactor (VHTR) which is the next generation nuclear reactor system, ceramics and graphite are used as the fuel coating material and the core structural material, respectively. Even if the accident occurs and the reactor power goes up instantly, the temperature of the core will change slowly. This is because the thermal capacity of the core is so large. Therefore, the VHTR system can passively remove the decay heat of the core by natural convection and radiation from the surface of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV). From the view point of the safety characteristic, the passive cooling system should be designed for the VHTR as the best way of the reactor and vessel cooling systems (VCS). So, the gas cooling system by natural convection is the one of the candidate systems for the VCS of the VHTR. This study is to develop the passive cooling system for the VHTR using the vertical rectangular channel inserting porous materials. In general, when the high temperature circular or rectangular channels are cooled by forced convection of gas, there are several methods for enhancement of heat transfer such as attaching radial or spiral fins on a channel surface or inserting twisted tape in a channel. The objective of this study is to investigate heat transfer characteristics by forced convection of porous materials inserted into a rectangular channel with high porosity. In order to obtain the heat transfer characteristics of the one-side heated vertical rectangular channel inserting the porous material, an experiment was carried out. From the results obtained in this experiment, it was found that an amount of removed heat by forced convection using porous material (porosity > 0.996) was about 15% higher than that without the copper wire. Furthermore, the ratio between the amounts of heat removed of the rectangular channel with the porous material and without the porous material increases with increasing temperature of the channel wall.