Water Cooled RCCS Facility
The RCCS is a key safety system that is important to the overall design of the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). The RCCS is to be designed for NGNP and developed under the auspices of the Department of Energy (DOE) Generation IV (GENIV) program. The water-cooled option for the RCCS design is currently part of the anticipated design for the Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR), and an option for the Prismatic Modular Reactor (PMR).
Our team will conduct separate-effects tests that are applicable to the RCCS, in support of the Natural-convection Shutdown heat-removal Test Facility (NSTF) that is planned to test the RCCS operation. With our geometrical scaling approach, we can:
- Empirically check the relevant scaling laws for the system
- develop key phenomenological models
- Use modeling to verify the overall behavior of the water-cooled RCCS for the NGNP design in a passive cooling-mode of operation.
Our goals are to:
- Develop scaling laws for transition from forced to natural convective flows in the standpipe and piping for single-phase flow
- Provide phenomenological models for two-phase flashing and flows, as well as phase separation and liquid carryover, respectively, in the storage tank
- Develop a system-level computational model for the passive cooling-mode of operation.
