Experimental study on heat transfer and resistance characteristics for finned tube of fast reactor sodium-air heat exchanger

Sodium-air heat exchanger is one of the important equipment in the decay heat removal system of sodium-cooled fast reactor, which together with the external environment constitutes the final heat trap for the residual heat of a reactor. Due to the vertically arranged finned tube structure adopted by the heat exchanger tubes of the sodium-air heat exchanger and the difference of the flow direction and velocity of the air at the different positions, the heat transfer and resistance characteristics are very different from of traditional finned tube heat exchanger. In this paper, based on the engineering design requirements of sodium-air heat exchanger, two kinds of experimental specimens were designed to study the heat transfer and flow resistance characteristics of finned tube bundles with air flow angles of 90° and 30°. The experimental results show that the heat transfer and resistance coefficients of the same finned tube with air flow angles of 90° are significantly greater than those of the finned tube with air flow angles of 30°. For the same air flow direction, the second finned tube has the largest heat transfer coefficient. The research provides a theoretical basis for the design and optimization of sodium-air heat exchanger. (authors)