Scientific program of the Karlsruhe Sodium Laboratory (KASOLA)

At the Institute of Neutron Physics and Reactor Technology of the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), the experimental sodium loop KASOLA (KArlsruhe SOdium LAboratory) is currently being erected, commissioning tests are scheduled in 2013. A key feature of the facility is its flexibility with respect to a wide spectrum of thermal hydraulic experiments. The facility hosts a sodium inventory of 7 m³ and it can operate up to 550 °C. A magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) pump can deliver a flow rate of up to 150 m³/h at a pressure head of 0.4 MPa. Due to the specific features of this type of pump, such as flow direction reversal, the investigation of numerous potentially occurring technical scenarios can be performed. The KASOLA facility contains in its base loop two test ports, a versatile test section and a pool test section. The versatile test section has a maximum effective height of up to 6 m to be used for component validation tests at almost typical axial heights, as well as generic thermal-hydraulic benchmark experiments. In the pool section, which has the dimensions 4x4x0.4 m³, a core simulator, an intermediate heat exchanger, and decay heat removal coolers can be hosted to simulate the flow in a sodium pool nuclear plant. The flow patterns in the sodium pool of a nuclear plant will be studied in detail on the basis of a Hele-Shaw approximation, for the transition between forced, mixed, and natural convection. Furthermore, in the facility, measurement techniques can be qualified and in-service inspection and repair (ISI&R) measures can be tested. An additional auxiliary port will be used for smaller experiments. Due to the flexibility of the KASOLA facility, aside from nuclear applications, aspects of thermo-electric energy conversion, such as the study of Alkali Metal Thermal Energy Converter (AMTEC), as well as thermal storage using liquid metals can also be covered. The experiments will be complemented by numerical analyses, both with CFD and with system codes such as TRACE and SIM-ADS, to tackle existing deficits in heat transfer modelling of low Prandtl number fluids. Additionally, as part of the European Framework Programme JASMIN, the new French-German nuclear system code ASTEC-Na is foreseen to be applied and qualified based on code-to-code and code-to-data comparison. As a first step, investigations are foreseen about the transition from forced to natural convection, plume formation in a backward facing step, and thermal energy storage technologies at high temperatures. (author)