Studies on the behaviour of a passive containment cooling system for the Indian advanced heavy water reactor

A passive containment cooling system has been proposed for the advanced heavy water reactor being designed in India. This is to provide long term cooling for the reactor containment following a loss of coolant accident. The system removes energy released into the containment through immersed condensers kept in a pool of water. An important aspect of immersed condensers working is the potential degradation of immersed condensers performance due to the presence of noncondensable gases. An experimental programme to investigate the passive containment cooling system behaviour and performance has been undertaken in a phased manner. In the first phase, system response tests were conducted on a small scale model to understand the phenomena involved. Tests were conducted with constant energy input rate and with varying energy input rate simulating decay heat, With constant energy input rate, pressures in volume V1 and V2 reached almost steady value. With varying energy input rate V1pressure dropped below the pressure in V2. The system could efficiently purge air from V1 to V2. The paper deals with the details of the tests conducted and the results obtained