Actual problems of the thermal hydraulic reliability ensuring of prospective nuclear reactors with supercritical parameters

Abstract

There is a significant lack of reliable information on the physical characteristics of thermohydraulic processes in emergency heat transfer modes when cooling the surface of fuel rods with light water coolant with supercritical thermodynamic parameters, in particular, on the physics of heat transfer processes and hydromechanics in the critical area. It is shown that in these conditions there is physical uncertainty about the causes of deteriorating heat transfer, which limits the possibility of creating effective calculation techniques for reliable determination of the upper limit of safe forcing of the heat transfer process in the core. At present, the vast majority of theoretical and experimental studies of thermohydraulic processes in the near-critical area have been performed only for the socalled “normal” heat transfer, which corresponds to the heat removal conditions with mixed turbulent convection of superheated to “gas” state of light water coolant in its inertial mode. Attention is paid to the possible appearance of macromolecular ensembles on this surface in the form of pseudo-vapor formations, which are capable of causing an emergency mode of pseudo-film boiling. On the basis of the given experimental data of various authors existence of rather deep physical analogy between processes of heat exchange in supercritical thermodynamic system and unheated boiling at subcritical parameters of the heat carrier is proved. Existence of the pseudo-boiling process in the conditions of supercritical thermodynamic parameters makes it impossible to use in the thermohydraulic calculation the empirical dependences for “hot” gas for the range of active zones operational parameters.