The multipurpose thermalhydraulic test facility TOPFLOW: an overview on experimental capabilities, instrumentation and results

A new multipurpose thermalhydraulic test facility TOPFLOW (TwO Phase FLOW) was built and put into operation at Forschungszentrum Rossendorf in 2002 and 2003. Since then, it has been manly used for the investigation of generic and applied steady state and transient two phase flow phenomena and the development and validation of models of Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) codes in the frame of the German CFD initiative. The advantage of TOPFLOW consists in the combination of a large scale of the test channels with a wide operational range both of the flow velocities as well as of the system pressures and temperatures plus finally the availability of an special instrumentation that is capable in high spatial and temporal resolving two phase flow phenomena, for example the wire-mesh sensors.