Contribution to the study of the thermal and hydrodynamical properties of a two-phase natural circulation flow of normal helium (He I) for the cooling of superconducting magnets

The method of cooling based on the thermosyphon principle is of great interest because of its simplicity, its passivity and its low cost. It is adopted to cool down to 4,5 K the superconducting magnet of the CMS particles detector of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiment under construction at CERN, Geneva. This work studies heat and mass transfer characteristics of two phase He I in a natural circulation loop. The experimental set-up consists of a thermosyphon single branch loop mainly composed of a phase separator, a downward tube, and a test section. The experiments were conducted with varying several parameters such as the diameter of the test section (10 mm or 14 mm) and the applied heat flux up to the appearance of the boiling crisis. These experiments have permitted to determine the laws of evolution of the various parameters characterizing the flow (circulation mass flow rate, vapour mass flow rate, vapour quality, friction coefficient, two phase heat transfer coefficient and the critical heat flux) as a function of the applied heat flux. On the base of the obtained results, we discuss the validity of the various existing models in the literature. We show that the homogeneous model is the best model to predict the hydrodynamical properties of this type of flow in the vapour quality range 0≤x≤30%. Moreover, we propose two models for the prediction of the two phase heat transfer coefficient and the density of the critical heat flux. The first one considers that the effects of the forced convection and nucleate boiling act simultaneously and contribute to heat transfer. The second one correlates the measured critical heat flux density with the ratio altitude to diameter. (author)