Development of a test facility for analyzing supercritical fluid blowdown

• Autor(a) principal: Lapa, Celso Marcelo
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Instituto de Engenharia Nuclear
• Tipo de documento: Artigo de conferência
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Institucional do IEN
• Texto Completo: http://carpedien.ien.gov.br:8080/handle/ien/2343
• topic: INAC 2015; Advanced nuclear reactors

The generation IV nuclear reactors under development mostly use supercritical fluids as the working fluid because higher temperatures improve the thermal efficiency. Supercritical fluids are used by modern nuclear power plants to achieve thermal efficiencies of around 45%. With water as the supercritical working fluid, these plants operate at a high temperature and pressure. However, experiments on supercritical water are limited by technical and financial difficulties. These difficulties can be overcome by using model fluids, which have more feasible supercritical conditions and exhibit a lower critical pressure and temperature. Experimental research is normally used to determine the conditions under which model fluids represent supercritical fluids under steady-state conditions. A fluid-to-fluid scaling approach has been proposed to determine model fluids that can represent supercritical fluids in a transient state. This paper presents an application of fractional scale analysis to determine the simulation parameters for a depressurization test facility. Carbon dioxide (CO2) and R134a gas were considered as the model fluids because their critical point conditions are more feasible than those of water. The similarities of water (prototype), CO2 (model) and R134a (model) for depressurization in a pressure vessel were analyzed.