Results of the General Atomic deposition loop program

The transport behavior of fission products in flowing helium streams has been studied to determine their deposition and re-entrainment characteristics. Such information is required for the design and safety analysis of high-temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs). A small high-pressure, high-temperature loop was constructed for deposition studies at near-HTGR conditions. Five loop experiments were performed to determine the plateout distribution of iodine, strontium, and cesium. In general, the plateout activity showed an exponential decrease with distance from the source with enhanced plateout at flow disturber locations (contractions, bends, etc.) and especially in a chill section where the surface was cooled. Blowdown tests were performed on selected loop specimens to determine the amount of re-entrainment caused by abnormally high wall shear stresses. The liftoff fraction (fractional amount removed) was shown to vary approximately linearly with the shear ratio (defined as the ratio of the steady state wall shear stress under blowdown conditions to that under normal operating conditions). Blowdown results are also reported for pipe sections taken from the GAIL-IV in-pile loop. Attempts were made to correlate these plateout data with the PAD code (Plateout Activity Distribution) which was developed for prediction of plateout distribution in an HTGR primary circuit. Because of inadequate modeling of the effects of the chill section, the agreement was generally poor. Consequently, to test further the PAD code, a review of the available plateout literature was made. Plateout distributions in the Peach Bottom and Dragon HTGRs and the Battelle Memorial Institute out-of-pile loop were successfully modeled