Numerical investigations of cooling heat transfer of supercritical water

The re-heater and the start-up system are the only basically new components in the balance of plant of the High Performance Light Water Reactor (HPLWR). Inside the tubes of the re-heater, supercritical fluid undergoes pseudo-condensing. CFD simulations have been performed in order to determine the heat transfer coefficient on the tube side more accurately. Numerical results are compared with Bruch's CO₂-experiment [12] for validation. The results illustrate the influence of buoyancy forces on the laminar turbulent transition for vertical downward flows. A simple heat transfer correlation [17] has been proposed for re-heater design, which is compared here with numerical simulations. Fluctuating density stratification is obtained for a horizontal layout which is similar to a Kelvin-Helmholtz instability. (author)