Average Natural Convective Heat Transfer of Air-cooled Condensing Heat Exchanger of Emergency Cooldown Tank - Effect of Tube Banks

Recently emergency cooldown tank(ECT) is a great concern of passive cooling system for the safety of nuclear reactor. After the operation of a conventional passive cooling system for an extended period, however, the water level falls as a result of the evaporation from the ECT, as steam is emitted from the open top of the tank. In this study, the effect of heat transfer area at the air cooled condensing heat exchanger was investigated by changing 5×5 tube banks into 4×4 and 3×3. Moreover, each of air-side natural convective heat transfer coefficient of tube banks was compared to existing correlations. This study presents the effect of heat transfer area at air-cooled condensing heat exchanger. As heat transfer area decreased, the temperature of outlet increased. In other words, the cooling performance got lower with the decrease of heat transfer area. In addition, the average natural convective heat transfer coefficient was 15.3 W/m²/K from the 4×4 tube banks, and 4.92 W/m²/K from the 3×3 tube banks, which had quite a large error more than 46% especially with the value of 4×4 tube banks compared to the value from correlation equation. Therefore, according to this result, it is needed to measure the local heat transfer coefficient of vertical cylinder more elaborately in further study