Experimental and Analytical Investigation of the Operation Mode of the Emergency Condenser of the SWR1000

The Siemens AG is developing the new innovative boiling water reactor concept SWR1000. New features are the passive safety systems (e.g. emergency condensers, building condensers, passive pressure pulse transmitters, gravity-driven core flooding lines).

For the experimental investigation of the emergency condenser effectiveness, the NOKO test facility has been constructed at the Forschungszentrum Jülich in cooperation with Siemens. This test facility has an operating pressure of 10 MPa and a maximum power of 4 MW for steam production. The emergency condenser bundle consists of eight tubes and is fabricated with planned geometry and material of the SWR1000. In more than 200 experiments, the emergency condenser power was determined as a function of pressure, water level and concentration of noncondensables in the pressure vessel as well of pressure, water level and temperature in the condenser.

Post test calculations of NOKO experiments were performed with an improved version of ATHLET. To calculate the heat transfer coefficients during condensation in horizontal tubes it was necessary to develop the module KONWAR and to implement it in ATHLET. KONWAR is based on the flow regime map of Tandon and includes several semiempirical correlations for the determination of the heat transfer coefficients. The comparison bet-ween calculations and experiments shows good agreement.