Review of Critical Heat Flux Correlations for Upward Flow in a Vertical Thin Rectangular Channel

From the view point of safety, this type of fuel has higher resistance to earthquake and external impact. The cross section of coolant flow channel in the reactor core composed with the plate fuel is a thin rectangular shape. Thermal-hydraulic characteristics of this thin rectangular channel are different with those of general circular rod fuel bundle flow channel. Accordingly it could be thought that the CHF correlation in a thin rectangular channel is different with that in a circular channel, for which a large number of researches on CHF prediction have been carried out. The objective of this paper is to review previous researches on CHF in a thin rectangular channel, summarize the important conclusion and propose the new simple CHF correlation, which is based on the data set under high pressure and high flow rate condition. The researches on CHF in rectangular channel have been partially carried out according to the pressure, heated surface number, heated surface wettability effect, flow driving force and flow direction conditions. From the literature researches on CHF for upward flow in a vertical thin rectangular channel, some CHF prediction methods were reviewed and compared. There is no universal correlation which can predict CHF at all conditions, but generally, Katto empirical correlation is known to be useful at high pressure and high flow rate. The new simple correlation was developed from the restricted data set, the CHF prediction capacity of which is better than that of Katto. Even though the prediction consistency of the new simple correlation is lower, MAE and RMS error decreased quite. For the more development of the new simple CHF correlation, the more advanced regression analysis method and theoretical analysis should be studied in future