Abstract
The High Flux Isotope Reactor (HFIR) at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) does not have a separate materials-irradiation flow loop and requires most materials and all fuel experiments to be placed inside a containment. This is necessary to ensure that internal contaminants such as fission products cannot be released into the primary coolant. As part of the safety basis justification, HFIR also requires that all experiments be able to withstand various accident conditions (e.g., loss of coolant) without generating vapor bubbles on the surface of the experiment in the primary coolant. As with any parallel flow system, HFIR is vulnerable to flow excursion events when vapor is generated in one of those flow paths. The effects of these requirements are to artificially increase experiment temperatures by introducing a barrier between the experimental materials and the HFIR coolant and to reduce experiment heat loads to ensure boiling doesn’t occur.
A new experimental facility for materials irradiation and testing in the HFIR is currently being developed to overcome these limitations. The new facility is unique in that it will have its own internal cooling flow totally independent of the reactor primary coolant and boiling is permitted. The reactor primary coolant will cool the outside of this facility without contacting the materials inside.
The ThermoSyphon Test Loop (TSTL), a full scale prototype of the proposed irradiation facility to be tested outside the reactor, is being designed and fabricated (Ref. 1). The TSTL is a closed system working as a two-phase thermosyphon. A schematic is shown in Fig. 1. The bottom central part is the boiler/evaporator and contains three electric heaters. The vapor generated by the heaters will rise and be condensed in the upper condenser, the condensate will drain down the side walls and be circulated via a downcomer back into the bottom of the boiler. An external flow system provides coolant that simulates the HFIR primary coolant. The two-phase flow code RELAP5-3D (Ref. 2) is the main tool employed in this design. The model has multiple challenges: boiling, condensation and natural convection flows need to be modeled accurately.