Development and testing of passive autocatalytic recombiners cooled by heat pipes

A severe accident in a nuclear power plant (NPP) can lead to core damage in conjunction with the release of large amounts of hydrogen. As hydrogen mitigation measure, passive autocatalytic recombiners (PARs) are used in today's pressurized water reactors. PARs recombine hydrogen and oxygen contained in the air to steam. The heat from this exothermic reaction causes the catalyst and its surroundings to heat up. If parts of the PAR heat up above the ignition temperature of the gas mixture, a spontaneous deflagration or detonation can occur. The aim of this work is the prevention of such high temperatures by means of passive cooling of the catalyst with heat pipes. Heat pipes are completely passive heat exchanger with a very high effective thermal conductivity. For a deeper understanding of the reaction kinetics at lower temperatures, single catalytic coated heat pipes are studied in a flow reactor. The development of a modular small-scale PAR model is then based on a test series with cooled catalyst sheets. Finally, the PAR model is tested inside a pressure vessel under boundary conditions similar to a real NPP. The experiments show, that the temperatures of the cooled catalytic sheets stay significantly below the temperature of the uncooled sheets and below the ignition temperature of the gas mixture under any set boundary conditions, although no significant reduction of the conversion efficiency can be observed. As a last point, a mathematical model of the reaction kinetics of the recombination process as well as a model of the fluid dynamic and thermohydraulic processes in a heat pipe are developed with the data obtained from the experiments.