Ga-cooled Passive Decay Heat Removal System
- Preliminary Concept of Advanced passive decay heat removal system (PDHRS) using gallium for SFR
The attractive properties ensure that gallium can play an important role in nuclear safety as an alternative coolant of the decay heat removal system of the SFR. In particular, there is an emphasis to passive safety system in nuclear reactor design so that reactors can be made more tolerant of failing, and have less dependence on engineers. The passive safety natural convection systems for decay heat removal have several benefits such as simplicity, reduction of the cost and usage problems of pumps. They are contributed to set the power plant in a safe and stable condition. Therefore, this study aims to experimentally investigate the natural convection capability of gallium as a feasibility study for the development of gallium-based passive safety features.
- Thermal-hydraulic analysis of a single-phase natural convection loop for liquid metal with MARS-LMR and computational fluid dynamics
This work discusses the results by using MARS-LMR code having Ga property table and computational fluid dynamics for the comparison of the heat transfer characteristics gained in experiments carried out in a single-phase natural convection loop. The loop consists of a vertical heating and cooling section and working fluid is liquid gallium. The experiment shows the natural convection capability of gallium by determining a flowrate formed according to a level of the heat input. By using the dimensionless numbers, the correlations in the tube at natural convection of gallium also are represented. This study can contribute to an advanced design of passive decay heat removal system with adopting a safer coolant to secure the safety more tightly of the current typical designs of sodium-cooled reactor.
Test facility
Nodalization and computational fluid dynamics analysis of test facility