Experimental validation of simulating natural circulation of liquid metal using water

Abstract

Liquid metal-cooled reactors use various passive safety systems driven by natural circulation. Investigating these safety systems experimentally is more advantageous by using a simulant. Although numerous experimental approaches have been applied to natural circulation-driven passive safety systems using simulants, there has been no clear validation of the similarity law. To validate the similarity law experimentally, SINCRO-V experiment was conducted using Wood's metal and water for simulant of the Wood's metal. A pair of SINCRO-V facilities with length-scale ratio of 14.1:1 for identical Bo’ was investigated, which was the main similarity parameter in temperature field simulation. In the experimental range of 0.2–1.0% of decay heat, the temperature distribution characteristics of the small water facility were very similar to that of the large Wood's metal facility. The temperature of the Wood's metal predicted by the water experiment showed good agreement with the actual Wood's metal temperature. Despite some error factors like discordance of Gr’ and property change along the temperature, the water experiment predicted the Wood's metal temperature with an error of 27%. The validity of the similarity law was confirmed by the SINCRO-V experiments.

Keywords

• Liquid metal
• Natural circulation
• Similarity law
• Modified Boussinesq number