Review of research using analogy concept for thermal hydraulic and severe accident experiments
Introduction
The performance of nuclear safety systems must be verified during design and licensing stages. However, it is hard to conduct such verification due to the extreme test conditions for severe accidents or requirements of large facilities especially for natural convection tests.
This paper suggests an experimental methodology using the analogy between heat and mass transfer as a preliminary tool for the verification especially for highly buoyant or extreme test conditions. The copper electroplating system using CuSO4 - H2SO4 is employed as the mass transfer system. Cupric ions are transferred from the anode to the cathode when potential is applied and the amount of cupric ion transferred corresponds to the amount of heat transferred by analogy, which can be easily and accurately measured by measuring the electric current. As the reduction of cupric ions at the cathode induces large density decrease of the solution, high buoyancy can be achieved with relatively small facilities. The system is free from radiation heat transfer and heat leakage to the environment. This paper summarizes some papers of the authors to introduce the methodology regarding studies for the In-Vessel Retention via External Reactor Vessel Cooling (IVR-ERVC), Reactor Cavity Cooling System (RCCS) and for the Critical Heat Flux (CHF).
Section snippets
Analogy between heat and mass transfers
Heat and mass transfer systems are analogous as the mathematical models describing the two phenomena are of the same form (Bejan, 2003). Therefore, although the two phenomena are different in nature, they can be treated mathematically the same. Table 1 summarizes the governing parameters for heat and mass transfer systems. This means that the heat transfer problem can be transformed to the mass transfer problem and vice versa. Thus, a heat transfer problem can be solved by its corresponding mass
In-Vessel Retention via External reactor vessel Cooling (IVR-ERVC)
There are two severe accident strategies aiming at avoiding containment failure by core melts aggression. One strategy assumes the break of the reactor vessel and involves the use of a core catcher underneath the reactor vessel to catch, spread, and cool the core melts. The other strategy tries to assure that the integrity of the reactor vessel is maintained by natural convection of the core melt and outside cooling (IVR-ERVC). To adopt the IVR-ERVC, the external vessel cooling should exceed
Conclusions
An experiment methodology that exploits the analogy between heat and mass transfer systems was reviewed. A few applications of the method to nuclear systems were presented: the natural convection heat transfer in an IVR situation and the mixed convection study in the RCCS system. In both cases, high Rayleigh numbers were achieved with small experimental facilities. The experimental results agreed reasonably well with the existing heat transfer results. The experimental correlations developed
CRediT authorship contribution statement
Bum-Jin Chung: Funding acquisition, Project administration, Resources, Supervision, Writing - original draft, Writing - review & editing. Myeong-Seon Chae: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization. Je-Young Moon: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Validation, Visualization. Hae-Kyun Park: Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology,
Declaration of Competing Interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by “KHNP-Creative & Leading Open-Innovation for Ultimate R&D (K-CLOUD)” of the Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power Co., LTD (KHNP), granted financial resource from the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Energy, Republic of Korea.
Bum-Jin Chung is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering Department in Kyung Hee University, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from Seoul National University, Korea, on the topic of AP-600 containment cooling capability assessment. He had worked for Korean Ministry of Science and Technology as the nuclear regulator and R&D officer. After he spent two years as the post-doctoral researcher in the University of Manchester, U.K, he became the Professor in Jeju National University. He had also served
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Bum-Jin Chung is a Professor of Nuclear Engineering Department in Kyung Hee University, Korea. He received his Ph.D. in 1994 from Seoul National University, Korea, on the topic of AP-600 containment cooling capability assessment. He had worked for Korean Ministry of Science and Technology as the nuclear regulator and R&D officer. After he spent two years as the post-doctoral researcher in the University of Manchester, U.K, he became the Professor in Jeju National University. He had also served as the national nuclear R&D program manager at the National Research Foundation of Korea for a year and joined the faculty of Kyung Hee University, March 2013. He had published a series of articles on the experimental researches of the condensation phenomena. He has been developing the analogy experimental methodology by using mass transfer (copper electroplating) system replacing heat transfer ones. His current research interests are the mixed convection heat transfers, electrochemical systems, and severe accident phenomena like IVR and Debris coolability.
Myeong-Seon Chae is a Post Doctor researcher in Nuclear Engineering Department of Kyung Hee University, Korea. She received her Ph.D. from Kyung Hee University, Korea. She has published 10 journal papers for the natural convection and mixed convection in a horizontal and vertical pipe. She has been studying intensively mixed convection experiments in PCS (Passive Cooling System). She received Curie Student Award for her research achievements in Korean Nuclear Society
Je-Young Moon is Ph.D. candidate of Nuclear Engineering Department in Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Korea. She received her master’s degree from Kyung Hee University, Korea. She has been studying natural convection phenomena of various applications from enclosure to helical coil since junior. Her research interests include convection heat transfers in packed bed, CFD simulation, pool boiling phenomena and electrochemical systems.
Hae-Kyun Park is Ph.D. candidate of Nuclear Engineering Department in Kyung Hee University, Yongin, Korea. He received his master’s degree from Kyung Hee University of Korea on the topic of corium behavior under IVR-ERVC (In-Vessel Retention of molten corium through External Reactor Vessel Cooling) condition. His current research interests are natural circulation system and boiling phenomenon with hydrogen evolution system. He has been awarded for citation awards of Nuclear Engineering and Technology (NET) from Korean Nuclear Society (KNS) in October, 2019.