Experimental data and calculation studies of critical heat fluxes at local disturbances of geometry of WWER fuel assemblies

The results of experiments executed in RRC 'Kurchatov Institute on the thermal-physical critical facility SVD are presented herein. The experiments modeled the drawing of two fuel rods to each other till touching WWER-1000 reactor in FA. The experimental model is a 7-rod bundle with the heated length of 1 m. The primary goal of experiments was to acquire the quantitative factors of the reduction in the critical heat fluxes as contrasted to the basic model (without disturbances of FA geometry) at the expense of local disturbance of a rod bundle geometry. As it follows from the experiment, the effect of decrease of the critical heat rate depends on combination of regime parameters and it makes 15% in the most unfavorable case (Authors)