Assessment of Critical Heat Flux correlations in narrow rectangular channels

Paper i proceeding, 2016

The aim of the work is to assess different CHF correlations when applied to vertical narrow rectangular channels with upward low-pressure water flow. This is a contribution to the improvement of the thermal-hydraulic modeling of the Jules Horowitz Reactor, which is a research reactor under construction at CEA-Cadarache (France). For this purpose, 46 CHF tests from the SULTAN-JHR experimental database were used. These experiments were performed at CEA-Grenoble in two vertical uniformly heated rectangular channels with gaps of 1.51 (SE3: 20 tests) and 2.16 mm (SE4: 26 tests). The experimental conditions ranged between 0.38 and 0.87 MPa for the outlet pressure, between 1200 and 6600 kg/m2/s for the mass flux, between 56.4 and 156.4 °C for the inlet liquid sub-cooling and between -0.01 and 0.12 for the outlet steam quality. Several models were tested. The Groeneveld look-up tables, which were developed mainly with experiments in pipes, significantly over-estimate the CHF. Furthermore, they fail to predict the decrease of the CHF with the reduction of the gap size. Doerffer’s modification of Groeneveld look-up table for internally heated annuli and the Sudo correlation for nuclear research reactors with plate-type fuel, give better results. In particular, Doerffer’s formula predicts the experimental data with a mean error of -10 % for SE4 and +17 % for SE3, while the Sudo relationship gives mean errors equal to -2.3 % and +32 %.