Downcomer and tie plate countercurrent flow in the Upper Plenum Test Facility (UPTF)

The limitation of vertical steam-water countercurrent flow, called flooding, is important for the operation of Emergency Core Cooling (ECC) Systems in Nuclear Reactors. The ECC water injection flooding behavior is scale dependent and the reactor size behavior cannot be extrapolated from small scale data. A new flooding correlation is presented, based on the classic flooding equation where the effects of gravity, interphase momentum exchange, and instability of the gas/liquid interface are considered. Development of a new correlation was necessary in order to correlate the reactor scale downcomer and upper tie plate countercurrent flow data gained in the Upper Plenum Test Facility (UPTF). The new correlation is an extension of the well-known Wallis-type and Kutateladze-type correlations. Each of the three correlations is valid for the experimental facilities on a certain scale. The range of applicability for each of the three correlations is defined for the case of downcomer and tie plate countercurrent flow.