Thermalhydraulic investigation using a test facility simulating 200 MW integral heating reactor

Since the middle of 1980's, a research program on heating reactor has been carried out at, Institute of Nuclear Energy Technology (INET) of Tsinghua U niversity in China, Chs healing reactor is a light water cooled, integral t ype natural circulation reactor with low system pressure and low core exit quality, it has the passive safety features and other advanced characterist ics of the next generation reactors. Because of a relatively long riser and low system pressure, a small quality perturbation at the exit of the core will lead to a relatively large variation of void fraction in the riser, so will the driving force. All of the above features made it very different from the typical PWRs and BWRs. In order to guarantee the safe operation of the heating reactor, a fu ll scale test loop HRTL-200, simulating HR-200 healing reactors in main geo metry and operation parameters, was constructed and operated under the broa d test conditions covering the 200MW heating reactor operation conditions a t INET. The HRTL-200 test facility, same of steady-state and two-phase flow instability test results from the test facility and the consideration how to choose the optimal design parameters for the heating reactors are shown in this; paper. The range of experimentally studied parameters are: the sys tem pressure is from 1.0 to 4.0 NPa, the largest heat Aux is about 50 W/cm( 2), and the quality at the exit, of the test section is less than 6%.