Influence of nonuniformity of the submerged perforated sheet on steam demand leveling on the evaporation surface of a VVER steam generator

The results of a calculation and experimental research of the influence of nonuniformity of the submerged perforated sheet on steam demand leveling on the evaporation surface are published in the current article. A short description of the PGV test facility and a measuring system whose test section is a transverse “cut” of an actual PGV-1000 steam generator with the internals is presented. The methods of experimental starts are explained and instrumentations are described. A uniformly perforated sheet with the flow section of 5.7% and a nonuniformly perforated sheet with the flow section of 4.3% on the cold half and 8.1% on the hot half were used in the experiments. The system pressure was approximately 7 MPa, the inlet steam flow rate was varied between 4.23 and 7.94 t/h, i.e., the steam velocity on the evaporation surface was 0.15–0.29 m/s. The experimental results were analyzed with (1) the engineering method based on estimating the flow rates of steam on hot and cold half by the experimental values of the pressure drop on submerged list and (2) the STEG code, which was developed for three-dimensional mathematical modeling of the two-phase thermohydraulics in the heat exchanger volume and upgraded. It was established that changing the perforation from a uniform to a nonuniform one increases the residual nonuniformity coefficient, which characterizes the flow of steam from the hot side to the cold side under the sheet. However, the steam separation becomes worse because of a high local residual nonuniformity coefficients near the border of two plates with different perforation levels.