SP‐100 GES/NAT IHX design and development testing

The Advanced Energy Systems (AES) of Westinghouse Electric Corporation is under subcontract to the General Electric Company to supply Primary Heat Transport System (PHTS) equipment for the SP‐100 Ground Engineering System (GES) Nuclear Assembly Test to be conducted at Westinghouse Hanford Company at Richland, Washington. The heat transport system functions as a non‐prototypic lithium primary system transferring reactor heat to a sodium secondary system via the Intermediate Heat Exchanger (IHX). Westinghouse is designing components for the primary system including the IHX, flowmeter, expansion tank, and heater. This paper describes the design and development testing of the IHX. Due to system conditions, the IHX must be designed to operate with a very large temperature difference between the primary and the secondary side, resulting in the need to use double wall heat exchanger tubing separated by a gas gap, in the selected U‐Shell/U‐Tube configuration. Special design consideration account for the large dif...