Steady-State and Stability Analysis of Natural Circulation in Gallium Thermal-Hydraulic Loop

摘要

Natural circulation of liquid metal through the GaTE facility has been modeled with the help of a reduced order model. The system can initialize and maintain velocity due to its stable nature. Control of the velocity can be implemented by changing heater power input; moreover, velocity profiles can be analytically obtained for more dynamic heater output scenarios such as those seen in a reactor shut-down. These models have shown that the GaTE facility will be able to successfully generate natural circulation flows in controlled outputs and allow the setup to successfully use these outputs for understanding more advanced natural circulation and thermal stratification thermal-hydraulics.