Supercritical water is being considered as a coolant in some advanced nuclear reactor designs on account of its potential to offer high thermal efficiency, compact size, elimination of steam generator, separator & dryer. As the nuclear reactor core comprises of many parallel channels, understanding supercritical flow stability in parallel channels would be important for reactor design and licensing. A closed Supercritical Pressure Parallel Channel Loop (SP-PCL) based on natural circulation with water as working fluid is proposed to be built in Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC), India. A computer code NOLSTA-p has been developed to carry out steady state and stability analysis of SP-PCL. Code predicts a very large unstable zone for SP-PCL without considering pipe wall thermal capacitance effect. However, the loop becomes completely stable on incorporating pipe wall thermal capacitance model in the computer code. The details of SPNCL, its modeling and analysis are presented in this paper.
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