Experimental examination of heat removal limitation of screw cooling tube at high pressure and temperature conditions

For development of high heat flux components for fusion machines, JAERI has developed high performance cooling tubes using pressurized water flow. A cooling tube with triangular fins on its inner surface has been tested. Because the fins can be machined by a simple mechanical threading, this tube is called a screw tube. The present study is intended to investigate heat transfer characteristics of the screw tube with M10 thread of 1.5-mm-pitch, which has the highest critical heat flux (CHF) in the previous experimental campaign compared with the tubes with various threads of different pitches. In addition, another CHF tests have been performed to examine the reduction of the heat removal performance of the screw tube caused with the increase of cooling water temperature up to 100 °C at the local pressure of 2 and 4 MPa. The results of CHF experiments are compared with an existing correlation for a smooth tube to evaluate its heat removal limitation at higher temperature condition compared with the previous ones.