Off design performance of compressors of 150MWe S-CO₂ Cycle for Sodium Cooled Fast Reactor

Not only large scale SFR power plant concepts but also small modular SFR power plant concepts are considered as hot research issues. KAIST research team also has been working on a SFR power plant concept. This research is more focused on small scale power plant and it adopts different concept which is coupling of supercritical CO₂ (S-CO₂) Brayton cycle to SFR. Conventional SFR power plant concept utilizes steam Rankine cycle with intermediate heat transport loop. Thus, some difficulties of obtaining public acceptance are expected since active sodium water reaction can be considered as a major issue to the public. In this manner, KAIST research team suggested S-CO₂ Brayton cycle as an alternative power conversion system for SFR. To apply S-CO₂ Brayton cycle to nuclear system, safety analysis for power conversion system should be performed for various postulated accident scenarios. Thus, off-design performances of each component are required. In this paper, efforts on turbomachinery off design performance prediction will be discussed