Design and stability limits of the HPLWR re-heater

The High Performance Light Water Reactor (HPLWR) is a particular design study of a supercritical water cooled reactor. A heat exchanger design has been proposed for the re-heater as a shell-and-tube heat exchanger. Inside the tubes fluid undergoes pseudo-condensing, e.g. it changes its density from steam-like to liquid-like properties (from 80 kg/m3 to 582 kg/m3) at supercritical pressure, whereas the shell side superheats intermediate pressure steam. For sub-critical pressures an instability has been reported by Goodykoontz and Dorsch (19679. The experiment exhibits unstable steam condensation in case of downward flow inside a tube of 7.4 mm diameter and 2.42 m length in some specific cases. The counter-current condenser was cooled with water flowing in an annulus surrounding the condenser tube. This experiment motivates the current investigation of instabilities for supercritical pseudo-condensation. The study includes static instabilities, i.e. Ledingegg instability and flow maldistribution of the parallel tubes, as well as pressure drop oscillations. At the present stage, no instabilities are predicted for the specific operation conditions of the HPLWR. The commercial system code APROS is used to perform one dimensional transient simulations of the described experiment to understand the physical mechanism. These simulations show that choking flow initiates the pressure oscillations. These periodically change steam temperatures, and consequently the condensation rate. In turn, this modifies the sound speed which is responsible for choking. Condensate reverse flow at choked conditions triggers the pressure waves. APROS simulations and experimental results agree well both in pressure amplitude and frequency. APROS simulations at supercritical pressure conditions did not exhibit any instability as the fluid velocity is clearly sub-sonic in the entire HPLWR re-heater. (authors)