Plateau facility in support to ASTRID and the sfr program: an overview of the first mock-up of the ASTRID upper plenum, MICAS

D. Guenadou (1) , I. Tkatschenko (1) , P. Aubert (1)

1 CEA-DES (ex-DEN) - CEA-Direction des Energies (ex-Direction de l'Energie Nucléaire)

The CEA and several industrial partners are involved in the development of a 4th generation reactor cooled by sodium, ASTRID (Advanced Sodium Technological Reactor for Industrial Demonstration). It is a 600MWe pool type reactor integrating cutting edge technologies.Developments are in progress especially for the vessel and the apparatus. Experiments are needed for both validation of numerical codes and specific studies. In this way, a thermal-hydraulic loop, the PLATEAU facility, has been developed and built at the CEA Cadarache. Different mock-ups can be connected to this loop to study the different issues at various reactor conditions. Currently, 4 mock-ups are identified the internal vessel, the entire pool reactor, the link between the external and the internal vessel, a part of the internal vessel at a higher scale to study specific issues.The MICAS mock-up at 1/6 scale is dedicated to study the flow regime of the internal vessel (hot plenum), both for code validation and also engineering design development.This mock-up has been built in transparent polymer to carry out some optical measurements as laser velocimetry. Numerical studies have been engaged to determine the general flow pattern in a way to identify the area of interest for detailed phenomenological studies.

Keywords: Sodium; fast neutron reactor; mock-up; code validation

Domains: Nuclear Experiment [nucl-ex]; Nuclear Theory [nucl-th]

D. Guenadou, I. Tkatschenko, P. Aubert. Plateau facility in support to ASTRID and the sfr program: an overview of the first mock-up of the ASTRID upper plenum, MICAS. NURETH16 - 16th International Topical Meeting on Nuclear Reactor Thermal Hydraulics, Aug 2015, Chicago, United States. ⟨cea-02509252⟩