Heat transfer in SiC compact heat exchanger

For development of a compact SiC heat exchanger, numerical heat transfer analysis was conducted to investigate its performance for a wide range of thermal media, liquid LiPb and helium gas, flow rates. The numerical model used was based on the heat exchanger test module developed by the authors. Within the authors’ experimental range, the heat quantity transferred from high temperature liquid LiPb to helium gas and the overall heat transfer coefficients obtained numerically are in agreement with the experimental results. Therefore, the numerical model has proved to be valid for estimation of heat transfer phenomena in the heat exchanger in incompressible regime. The heat quantity transferred from LiPb to He amounts up to 3.7 kW at helium pressure of 0.5 MPa. On the basis of the numerical results, a correlation for helium forced convection heat transfer in the heat exchanger is presented, which describes numerical results with an error of 1%. For heat transfer in LiPb, the Nusselt numbers calculated from an existing correlation for liquid metal heat transfer agree well with the present numerical results. The heat transfer of LiPb in the SiC compact heat exchanger would possibly be predicted from the conventional correlations based on the studies of liquid metal convective heat transfer. A concept of SiC compact heat exchanger studied could be applied to a design of intermediate heat exchangers operating at high temperatures in fusion reactor, as well as HTTR and VHTR systems.