Thermal tests of large recirculation cooling installations for nuclear power plants

The article presents the results from thermal tests of some recirculation installations for cooling air in nuclear power plant premises, including the volume under the containment. The cooling effect in such installations is produced by pumping water through their heat-transfer tubes. Air from the cooled room is blown by a fan through a bundle of transversely finned tubes and is removed to the same room after having been cooled. The finning of tubes used in the tested installations was made of Grade 08Kh18N10T and Grade 08Kh18N10 stainless steels or Grade AD1 aluminum. Steel fins were attached to the tube over their entire length by means of high-frequency welding. Aluminum fins were extruded on a lathe from the external tube sheath into which a steel tube had preliminarily been placed. Although the fin extrusion operation was accompanied by pressing the sheath inner part to the steel tube, tight contact between them over the entire surface was not fully achieved. In view of this, the air gap’s thermal resistance coefficient was introduced in calculating the heat transfer between the heat-transferring media. The air gap average thickness was determined from the test results taking into account the gap variation with temperature due to different linear expansion coefficients of steel and aluminum. These tests, which are part of the acceptance tests of the considered installations, were carried out at the NPO TsKTI test facility and were mainly aimed at checking if the obtained thermal characteristics were consistent with the values calculated according to the standard recommendations with introduction, if necessary, of modifications to those recommendations.