An Experimental Facility to Investigate the Natural Circulation Dynamics in Presence of Distributed Heat Sources

This paper deals with the dynamic behaviour of the DYNASTY facility. DYNASTY is a natural circulation loop aimed at studying the natural circulation dynamics in presence of volumetric distributed heat sources, and is provided with an All-External Heat Flux (A-EHF) to reproduce the effect of the Internal Heat Generation (IHG). To compare the A-EHF and the IHG cases, semi-analytical and numerical approaches are considered. As for the semi-analytical investigation, a linear analysis is performed to study the asymptotic equilibrium stability. Regarding the numerical viewpoint, an Object-Oriented 1D model and a 3D Computational-Fluid-Dynamics model are adopted to study the time-dependent behaviour.