Heat transfer characteristics of redan structure in large-scale test facility STELLA-2

The construction of STELLA-2 facility is on-going to demonstrate the safety system of PGSFR and to provide comprehensive understanding of transient behavior under DBEs. Considering that most events are single-phase natural circulation flow with slow transient, STELLA-2 was designed with reduced-height of 1/5 length scale. The ratio of volume to surface area in the vessel can relatively increase resulting in excessive heat transfer. Therefore, a steady-state thermal-hydraulic analysis was performed and the effect of design change to reduce the heat transfer through redan was investigated. The heat transfer through single wall redan in STELLA-2 was 3% of the core power, comparable to 1% of the core power in PGSFR. By applying the insulated redan, about 70% of decrease effect was observed. The effect on transient behavior was also evaluated. The conclusion of this study was directly applied to the STELLA-2 design and the modified version is under construction.