Investigation of natural convection in large pools on the example of heating up the secondary side of an emergency condenser

Natural convection is a basic principle for a lot of industrial processes. As an example for the investigation of natural convection phenomena, the paper describes investigations of a passive heat removal system in advanced designs of nuclear power plants. The SWR1000 concept of Siemens AG includes emergency condensers. In the Research Centre Jülich at the NOKO test facility experiments were performed, to investigate the heat transfer capability under different operation modes. In the last time the heating up phenomena on the secondary side were investigated in detail. The paper describes simulations performed in the Forschungszentrum Rossendorf using the CFD-code CFX-4 of AEA-Technology and comparisons to the experiments. Performing additional calculations, measures to avoid undesired temperature stratification were investigated.