Presentation and comparison of experimental critical heat flux data at conditions prototypical of light water small modular reactors

This paper presents a brief summary of CHF data acquired from an experimental facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison designed and built to study CHF at high pressure and low mass flux ranges in a 2 × 2 chopped cosine rod bundle prototypical of conceptual SMR designs. The experimental CHF test inlet conditions range from pressures of 8-16 MPa, mass fluxes of 500-1600 kg/m2 s, and inlet water subcooling from 250 to 650 kJ/kg. The experimental data is also compared against several accepted prediction methods whose application ranges are most similar to the test conditions.