Experimental study of the natural convection characteristics of finned-tube sodium-to-air heat exchanger

The finned-tube sodium-to-air heat exchanger plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of prototype Gen IV sodium-cooled fast reactors. It is designed to actively operate with power, but it is also important to consider its passive performance to ensure availability during power-out conditions. This study focused on addressing this limitation through a natural convection experiment using a dedicated facility, and the obtained results were compared with the safety analysis code MARS-LMR. The overall temperature difference was observed to be within an acceptable range of less than 5 %. While the code calculations aligned well with the experimental results at higher temperatures, they underestimated the experimental results at lower temperatures. These findings can serve as a basis for other codes employing different heat transfer correlations and for future reactor licensing purposes.