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Sodium-water reaction (SWR) is a design basis accident of a sodium-cooled fast reactor (SFR). A breach of the heat transfer tube in a steam generator results in contact of liquid sodium with water. Typical phenomenon is that the pressurized water blows off, vaporizes, and mixes with the liquid sodium. It is necessary to quantify the SWR phenomena in the safety evaluation of the SFR system. In this paper, a new computer program has been developed and the SWR in a counterflow diffusion flame is studied by a numerical simulation and an experiment. The experiment is designed based on the numerical simulation so that the stable reaction flame is maintained for a long time and physical and chemical quantities are measured. From the comparison of the analysis and the experiment, there exist discrepancies that may be caused by the assumptions of the chemical reaction. Hence, a new experiment is proposed to enhance the measurement accuracy and to investigate the reason of the disagreement. The authors propose a depressurized experiment and show the preliminary result of the experiment. It is found that a stable chemical reaction flame is formed. With the depressurization, it is expected that the flame location can be controlled and the reaction region becomes thicker because of decrease in the reactant gas density. [DOI: 10.1115/1.3043822]

Byline: Frank Schafer, Annalisa Manera The test facility CIRCUS (CIRculation Under Start-up) was built to study the start-up phase of a natural-circulation BWR. During the start-up,so-called flashing-induced instabilities can arise. These instabilities are induced by flashing (i.e., steam production in adiabatic conditions) of the coolant in the long riser section, which is placed above the core to enhance the flow rate. The flashing that occurs in the riser causes an imbalance between driving force and pressure losses in the natural-circulation loop, giving rise to flow oscillations. Within the European-Union 5th Framework Programme, a project, NACUSP (Natural circulation and stability performance of BWRs), has been started in December 2000, having as one of its main aims the understanding of the physics of the phenomena involved during the start-up phase of natural-circulation-cooled BWRs, providing a large experimental database and validating state-of-the-art thermo-hydraulic codes in the low-pressure, low-power operational region of these reactors. One part of this project deals with the modelling of selected CIRCUS tests using the thermo-hydraulic code ATHLET (Analysis of THermal-hydraulics of LEaks and Transients). This paper gives an overview about experiments and simulations. The code ATHLET is used to investigate the dynamic behaviour of the CIRCUS test facility and the results of the calculations are compared with the experimental data.