Steam condensation heat transfer in the presence of noncondensables in a vertical tube of passive containment cooling system

Abstract

A database for laminar condensation heat transfer is constructed from the previous experimental data at various condensation conditions. Based on the database, the condensation models in the standard RELAP5/MOD3.2 code are assessed and improved. Two wall film condensation models, the default and the alternative, are used in RELAP5/MOD3.2. The default model of the laminar film condensation in RELAP5/MOD3.2 does not give any reliable predictions, and its alternative model always predicts higher values than the experimental data. Therefore, it is needed to develop a new correlation based on the experimental data of various operating ranges. A set of condensation experiments in the presence of noncondensable gas in a vertical tube of the passive containment cooling system of the CP-1300 are performed. The experimental results show that the heat transfer coefficients (HTCs) increase as the inlet air mass fraction decreases and the inlet saturated steam temperature decreases. However, the dependence of the inlet mixture Reynolds number on the HTC is small for the operating range. An empirical correlation is developed, and its predictions are compared with experimental data to show good agreement with the standard deviation of 22.3%. The experimental HTCs are also compared with the predictions from the default and the alternative models used in RELAP5/MOD3.2. The experimental apparatus is modeled with two wall-film condensation models in RELAP5/MOD3.2 and the empirical correlation, and simulations are performed for several subtests to be compared with the experimental results. Overall, the simulation results show that the default model of RELAP5/MOD3.2 underpredicts the HTCs, and the alternative model overpredicts them, while the empirical correlation predicts them well throughout the condensing tube. Both the nodalization study and the sensitivity study are also performed. The nodalization study shows that the variation of the node number does not change both mode...