Experimental study on transient characteristic of passive containment cooling system

Separated heat pipe is an efficient passive heat transfer device. It is widely used on chemical and aerospace industry. In this paper, the transient characteristics of the separated heat pipe which applied to a containment cooling system were studied. According to the experiment, the start-up transition characteristic of cooling system were mainly described. The influences of containment initial pressure and thermal load of separated heat pipe loop were analyzed. Based on the experimental data, it shows that the separated heat pipe is feasible for containment cooling system. It can remove the heat of containment vessel passively on design basis accident. And the separated type heat pipe cooling system has the working condition of flow instability region. The influence factors of which is relevant to cooling water tank temperature, containment pressure and system input power. The flow instability has little effects on the trend of containment pressure.