Recirculating steam generator operation at very low power

The behaviour of recirculating SG's at very low power has been thoroughly investigated by laboratory and on-site tests as well as numerical simulations. A special experimental program dedicated to recirculation threshold determination has been performed on the Freon SG mock-up CLOTAIRE. These laboratory data are completed with transients of feedwater injections at hot stand-by on two instrumented SG's, one boiler type SG and one economizer type SG. The phenomena are different on both types. In boiler SG's, the SG behaves like a U-tube and recirculation stops around 2% load at stand-by temperature and water level. In economizer SG's, the presence of 2 separate down-comers and a divider plate inside the tube bundle allows a recirculation loop by-passing the separators. The mixing of saturated and cold water induced by this loop limits down-comer cooling and thus alleviates the thermal load on the tube sheet. These tests were used to validate the SG transient analysis 1-D code ANETH. (author)