Safety system consists of many active systems in recent years. However, there are always probabilities of failures of these active safety systems' due to faulty operation by human-error overlaps causing a severe accident as happened in Chernobyl and Three Mile Island cases. Passive Containment Cooling System (PCCS) is one of the cooling safety systems, which prevents nuclear reactor containment from over-pressurizing and breaking in case of the loss of coolant accident. A conventional PCCS is installed in the upper part of nuclear reactor containment, and the containment pressure decreases by the steam condensation. However, for a country with frequent earthquakes, it is not suitable for installing PCCS because the system requires earthquake-proof design and the water capacity in the tank is restricted. The concept of PCCS with vertical heat transfer pipe considering above challenges, which equipped vertical long heat transfer pipe inside, has been proposed by Aritomi et al. The objective of this study is to clarify the heat transfer characteristics of PCCS with vertical pipe to experimentally investigate the influence of non-condensable gas on condensation. Furthermore, a digital video camera is used to measure the behavior of condensation drops. The experimental apparatus consists of a tank, a cooling water supply system and a heat exchanger. The tank is made of a stainless steel and simulated the nuclear reactor containment during an accident. The cooling pipe installed in the tank is made of stainless steel tube. Cooling water at a constant temperature is poured in the test part of heat transfer pipe perpendicularly installed in the tank by forced circulation, and then condensation is induced at the heat transfer surface. At that time, the temperature of the cooling water between inlet and outlet of the pipe has been measured to calculation the over-all heat transfer coefficient between the cooling water and atmosphere in the tank. Thus, the heat transfer coefficient between heat transfer surface and the atmosphere in a tank considering the influence of the non-condensable gas has been clarified. An important finding of this study is that the amount of condensation in the steamy atmosphere included non-condensable gas depends on coolant Reynolds number, especially the concentration of non-condensable gas has an influence greatly on the amount of condensation. And from results of image data processing, it is understandable that the causes with decreases of heat transfer coefficient and amount of heat transfer in the reduction of drop glowing speed.
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