Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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PILLAR: Integral test facility for LBE-cooled passive small modular reactor research and computational code benchmark

  • Shin, Yong-Hoon (Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Park, Jaeyeong (School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Hur, Jungho (School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Nuclear Engineering, Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Jeong, Seongjin (Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Seoul National University) ;
  • Hwang, Il Soon (Department of Energy Systems Engineering, Seoul National University)
  • Received : 2021.03.20
  • Accepted : 2021.05.17
  • Published : 2021.11.25
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Abstract

An integral test facility, PILLAR, was commissioned, aiming to provide valuable experimental results which can be referenced by system and component designers and used for the performance demonstration of liquid-metal-cooled, passive small modular reactors (SMRs) toward their licensing. The setup was conceptualized by a scaling analysis which allows the vertical arrangements to be conserved from its prototypic reactor, scaled uniformly in the radial direction achieving a flow area reduction of 1/200. Its final design includes several heater rods which simulate the reactor core, and a single heat exchanger representing the steam generators in the prototype. The system behaviors were characterized by its data acquisition system implementing various instruments. In this paper, we present not only a detailed description of the facility components, but also selected experimental results of both steady-state and transient cases. The obtained steady-state test results were utilized for the benchmark of a system code, achieving a capability of accurate simulations with ±3% of maximum deviations. It was followed by qualitative comparisons on the transient test results which indicate that the integral system behaviors in passive LBE-cooled systems are able to be predicted by the code.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by a National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Ministry of Science and ICT, Republic of Korea (NRF-2021M2D1A1019061). The authors would like to express their gratitude to Mr. Y.M. Park and his colleagues at Moojin Keeyeon for their design support and fabrication of PILLAR, and also to Mr. B.S. Kim and his coworkers at Samjin for their technical support.

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