Preliminary Analysis of Supercritical CO₂ loop Using MARS

The supercritical carbon dioxide Brayton cycle has become a strong candidate for use in the next generation nuclear reactors. The simplicity, compactness, cost, and thermal efficiency are known as the main advantages of the cycle. The relatively high efficiency can be reached in lower temperature range than that of helium Brayton cycles. The size of the turbomachinery is also very small compared to the helium Brayton cycle or the steam Rankine cycle, which also contributes in reducing the cost. To test the cycle under many different conditions a facility named SCO₂PE has been built in KAIST. The experimental data is to be compared with simulation results from a code named MARS. The loop performance was validated preliminarily. Since MARS is mainly constructed for two phase flow modeling and the correlation package is based on water, we should check how well current MARS can simulate supercritical CO₂ system. Any alternatives that can draw more accurate results should be checked for. Also, additional experiments should be executed in different temperature and pressure ranges