[en] As part of the effort to evaluate the concept of external passive cooling of core melt by cavity flooding under severe accident conditions, a subscale boundary layer boiling (SBLB) facility, consisting of a pressurized water tank with a condenser unit, a heated hemispherical test vessel, and a data acquisition/photographic system, was developed to simulate the boiling process on the external bottom surface of a fully submerged reactor vessel. Transient quenching and steady-state boiling experiments were conducted in the facility to measure the local critical heat flux (CHF) and observe the underlying mechanisms under well controlled saturated and subcooled conditions. Large elongated vapor slugs were observed in the bottom region of the vessel which gave rise to strong upstream influences in the resulting two-phase liquid-vapor boundary layer flow along the vessel outer surface. The local CHF values deduced from the transient quenching data appeared to be very close to those obtained in the steady-state boiling experiments. Comparison of the SBLB data was made with available 2-D full-scale data and the differences were found to be rather small except in a region near the bottom center of the vessel. The angular position of the vessel outer surface and the degree of subcooling of water had dominant effects on the local critical heat flux. They totally dwarfed the effect of the physical dimensions of the test vessels. (author)