Experimental Study on Stainless Steel 316L Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger at High Temperature and High Pressure Gas Environments

A Printed Circuit Heat Exchanger (PCHE) is one of the candidates for the IHX in a VHTR, because its operation temperature and pressure are larger than any other compact heat exchanger types. Mylavarapu et al. fabricated a laboratory scale Alloy 617 PCHE and experimentally investigated its thermo-hydraulic performance in a High-Temperature Helium Facility (HTHF) up to 800 .deg. C and 3 MPa. The Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute has developed a high-temperature PCHE for a VHTR and operated a very high temperature Helium Experimental LooP (HELP) to verify the performance of the high-temperature heat exchanger at the component-level. In this study, the experimental data include the surface temperature distribution, the pressure drops, and the thermal expansion displacements. The measuring instruments are installed to measure these parameters during the performance test of the stainless steel 316L PCHE. The measured pressure drops in the PCHE shows that the flow maldistribution must be required to quantify the pressure drop in the primary side. Thermal deformation of PCHE was measured at the experimental condition. The temperature gradient at the primary outlet region caused the port distortion. The elbows of the pipeline can absorb the thermal expansion of the PCHE, but the port distortion must be considered to quantify the thermal deformation at the future alloy 617 PCHE test