An experimental study of hypervapotron structure in external reactor vessel cooling

Highlights: • Experiments are performed to study the application of hypervapotron in ERVC design. • CHF experiments on two surfaces are conducted under different flow conditions. • Hypervapotron improves CHF performance by 40–60% compared with smooth surface. • Visualization shows fin structure removes vapor mushroom for better liquid supply. - Abstract: In vessel retention (IVR) is one of the key strategies for many advanced LWR designs to mitigate postulated severe accidents. The success of IVR substantially relies on external reactor vessel cooling (ERVC) by which the decay heat is removed from the melt core in the reactor vessel lower head. The main challenge of IVR is to provide an adequate safety margin of ERVC against critical heat flux (CHF) of subcooled flow boiling in the reactor lower head flow channel. Due to uncertainties in corium melt pool configuration, large CHF margin of ERVC is usually required by regulatory authorities to demonstrate reliability of severe accident mitigation methods. Various CHF enhancement designs have been proposed and studied in literature. In this paper, an experimental study of hypervapotron structure as a novel design to improve CHF performance of ERVC is conducted. Hypervapotron is chosen as one of the potential engineering options for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER) program as a divertor structure to remove highly intense heat from fusion chamber. This study is to conduct CHF experiments at typical PWR ERVC working conditions. The CHF experiments are performed in a 30 mm by 61 mm rectangular flow channel with a 200 mm long heated surface along the flow direction. Both smooth and hypervapotron surface are tested at various inclination angles of the test section to simulate various positions of the reactor lower head. The hypervapotron is found to have a 40–60% CHF improvement compared with the smooth surface. The high speed visualization indicates that hypervapotron is able to effectively remove big vapor mushrooms on the heating surface.