Study on natural convection capability of liquid gallium for passive decay heat removal system (PDHRS)

Abstract

The safety issues of the SFRs are important due to the fact that it uses sodium as a nuclear coolant, reacting vigorously with water and air. For that reason, there are efforts to seek for alternative candidates of liquid metal coolants having excellent heat transfer property and to adopt improved safety features to the SFR concepts. This study considers gallium as alternative liquid metal coolant applicable to safety features in terms of chemical activity issue of the sodium and aims to experimentally investigate the natural convection capability of gallium as a feasibility study for the development of gallium-based passive safety features in SFRs. In this paper, the design and construction of the liquid gallium natural convection loop were carried out. The experimental results of heat transfer coefficient of liquid gallium resulting in heat removal ∼2.53kW were compared with existing correlations and they were much lower than the correlations. To comparison of the experimental data with computer code analysis, gallium property code was developed for employing MARS-LMR (Korea version of RELAP) based on liquid gallium as working fluid.