Thermal-hydraulic test facilities and some test results of integrated heating reactors

Since the middle of the eighties of this century a research program both for heating reactor and investigation of heating reactor thermal-hydraulics has been carried out in Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology(INET) of Tsinghua university in China. This kind of heating reactor is a light water cooled and integrated natural circulation reactor with low system pressure and low quality at the exit of core. Because of relatively long riser and low system pressure, a little change of the quality at the exit of the core wilI result in a relatively large variation of void fraction in the riser. Two full scale test loops, HRTL-5 and HRTL-200 simulating the HR-5 and HR-200 heating reactors in geometry and operation parameters respectively, and some test results from the HRTL-200 test facility are shown in this paper. The range of studied system pressure is from 1.0MPa to 4.0MPa, the largest heat flux is about 50 W/cm2, and the quality at the exit of test section is less than 5%