The supercritical water cooled reactor (SCWR) is one of the innovative water cooled reactor (WCR) concepts mainly for large scale production of electricity. By utilizing its high coolant temperature, the SCWR is expected to achieve much higher thermal efficiencies than those of current WCRs, and thereby promise improved economics. The objective of the CRP is to improve the understanding and prediction accuracy of thermal hydraulics phenomena relevant to SCWRs and to benchmark numerical toolsets for their analysis. Several key phenomena, such as heat transfer, pressure drop and flow stability, have been identified as crucial to the successful development of SCWRs. This CRP will enhance understanding of thermal hydraulics phenomena, sharing of experimental and analytical results, prediction methods for key thermal hydraulics parameters, and cross-training of personnel between participating institutes.
The overall objective of the CRP is to improve the understanding of thermal-hydraulics phenomena and prediction accuracy of thermal-hydraulics parameters related to SCWRs and to benchmark numerical toolsets for SCWR thermal-hydraulics analyses.
1) Improve predictive capability of heat transfer for SCWR fuel related geometries.
2) Improve predictive capability of pressure drop for SCWR fuel related geometries.
3) Improve predictive capability of natural circulation and parallel channel stability boundary.
4) Improve predictive capability of critical flow.
5) Improve predictive capability of CHF at near critical pressures.
6) Improve predictive capability of subchannel flow.
Besides knew knowledge generated through new experiments and proposed correlations, the outputs and this CRP findings have initiated launching a new proposal. Elven Member States sent a white paper to the IAEA requesting to consider launching new CRP in focusing exclusively on closing the T-G haps in moving SCWR paper designs to prototyping.