In case of an accident in a nuclear power plant with combined initiating events, (loss of ultimate heat sink and station blackout) additional heat removal system could transfer the decay heat from the core to and diverse ultimate heat sink. On additional heat removal system, which is based upon a Brayton cycle with supercritical CO2 as working fluid, is currently investigated within an EU-funded project, sCO2-HeRo (Supercritical carbon dioxide heat removal system). It shall serve as a self-launching, self-propelling and self-sustaining decay heat removal system to be used in severe accident scenarios. Since a Brayton cycle produces more electric power that it consumes, the excess electric power can be used inside the power plant, e.g. recharging batteries. A small-scale demonstrator will be attached to the PWR glass model at Gesellschaft für Simulatorforschung GfS, Essen, Germany.
In order to design and build this small-scale model, cycle calculations are performed to determine the design parameters from which a layout can be derived.
