DISEÑO, CONSTRUCCIÓN Y AUTOMATIZACIÓN DE UN CIRCUITO PARA LA MEDICIÓN DE PÉRDIDA DE CARGA TRIDIMENSIONAL EN CANALES CON GEOMETRÍAS COMPLEJAS

NALÍN, OSCAR; MARCEL CHRISTIAN PABLO; MASSON, V.

Buenos Aires

Simposio; Reunión Anual Asociación Argentina de Tecnología Nuclear (AATN) XL; 2013

Asociación Argentina de Tecnología Nuclear

Nuclear power plants can generate very high heat fluxes which are commonly limited by the cooling capabilities of the system. In water cooled reactors this limitation is due to the so-called critical heat flux and is a well known phenomenon. By improving the cooling capabilities in the neighborhood of the regions where critical heat flux occur first, the produced power could be increased while maintaining the required safety margins. For the optimization process of nuclear fuel assemblies, two complementary experimental facilities are proposed, one with the capability to perform detailed pressure drop measurements allowing three-dimensional reconstruction, and another one for critical heat flux tests. In this work, the design and test of a preliminary version of the facility for pressure drop measurements in complex geometries is presented. As a result, it is verified the feasibility of the proposed pressure measurement system to describe the flow in a fuel assembly channel. In addition, detailed data was generated which could be used for numerical code validations.