Experimental study of the water film coverage and the delay time on water distribution phenomenon in PCS of CAP1400

Highlights: • WADE test facility has been designed and built, which adopted full size steel containment test section of PCS of CAP1400. • The undisturbed switching test loop diminished the cooling water flow rate fluctuation at the initial stage of the test. • The video acquisition system for the measurement of water film coverage has good stability, high accuracy. • The water film coverage on the surface of a large curvature space increases with Reynolds number increasing. • The delay time decreases with the increase of Reynolds number. - Abstract: State nuclear power technology R&D centre (SNPTRD) has designed and built the new water distribution test facility (WADE) which adopted the full size steel containment test section of passive containment cooling system (PCS) of CAP1400. This paper presents the design of the test section (including watershed structure system, bucket and weir system), loop system, support system, instrumentation and control system of WADE to attain high quality water film coverage and delay time data. The correlations of water film coverage and delay time with different Reynolds number were obtained. The experimental results show the feasible design of the test facility, and the accuracy of the instrumentation and control system.