Phenomenological prediction of CHF under boiling water reactor (BWR) conditions

Critical Heat Flux (CHF) is an important parameter for the thermal design of any heat generating system, most importantly, nuclear reactors. Owing to the complex mechanisms of CHF there has been a large proliferation of the correlations, each having narrow range of validity, which shows that the empirical correlation is not an appropriate approach for the CHF prediction for a wide range of validity. This limitation has led to the development of the phenomenological approach of the CHF prediction. The film dryout mechanism is applicable to the high quality CHF corresponding to the annular flow pattern in which the progressive depletion of the liquid film leads to dryout. The basic concern in the prediction of dryout is the accuracy in the evaluation of the droplet deposition and entrainment. There are various models for the estimation of the entrainment and deposition of droplets. However, most of these models are based on the air-water data at the atmospheric conditions and hence their applicability to the BWR conditions needs to be confirmed. Some of the models are based on the steam water data which needs to be validated for the dryout prediction under BWR conditions. In this paper, the film dryout modelling has been carried out for the prediction of CHF using appropriate models for entrainment fraction and deposition coefficient. The results have been compared with the CHF data generated to substantiate the appropriateness of the selected models under BWR conditions. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.