Experimental Evaluation of Critical Heat Flux in Downward-Facing Boiling on SS304 L Flat Plate Relevant to In-Calandria Retention in PHWRs

Retention of corium inside the calandria vessel (CV) by externally cooling it by calandria vault water is essential to mitigate severe accidents in pressurized heavy water reactor (PHWR). The thermal failure of CV can be prevented by effective decay heat removal on the outer surface of CV using vault water, which depends on the heat transfer behavior from the outer surface of CV to the vault water. Determination of limiting heat removal capability of vault subcooled water through outer surface of CV is very important. Since the CV has a very large diameter and length, the bottom most part of the CV almost behaves as a flat plate with downward natural convection boiling heat transfer. The natural convection heat transfer is lesser on the flat surface as compared to the curved surface of the CV. Thus, the critical heat flux (CHF) on the flat surface under downward boiling condition is the limiting CHF of the CV under external surface boiling scenario. In order to estimate CHF in this configuration with local boiling, experiments were carried out on a downward facing SS304 L flat plate simulating the conditions of CV of 700 MWel Indian PHWR. The pool boiling CHF obtained in this study is also compared with other earlier works.