Thermal-hydraulic instabilities in natural circulation flow loops under supercritical conditions

In recent years, a growing interest has been generated in investigating the thermal hydraulics and flow stability phenomenon in supercritical natural circulation loops. These flow conditions are relevant to some of the innovative passive safety designs proposed for the Gen-IV Supercritical Water Reactor (SCWR) concepts. A computational model has been developed at UW Madison which provides a good basic simulation tool for the steady state and transient analysis of one dimensional natural circulation flow, and can be applied to conduct stability analysis. Several modifications and improvements were incorporated in an earlier numerical scheme before applying it to investigate the transient behavior of two experimental loops, namely, the supercritical water loop at UW-Madison and the supercritical carbon-dioxide (SCCO2) loop at Argonne National Laboratories. Although the model predicted development of instabilities for both SCW and SCCO2 loop which agrees with some previous work, the experiments conducted at SCCO2 loop exhibited stable behavior under similar conditions. To distinguish between numerical effects and physical processes, a linear stability approach has also been developed to investigate the stability characteristics associated with the natural circulation loop systems for various inlet conditions, input powers and geometries. The linear stability results for the SCW and SCCO2 loops exhibited differences with the corresponding transient simulations. This linear model also predicted the presence of instability in the SCCO 2 loop for certain high input powers contradictory to the experimental findings. Dimensionless parameters were proposed which would generalize the stability characteristics of the natural circulation flow loops under supercritical conditions.