Immortal experimental loop at JAEA - Post-process and validation

For the R&D of lead-bismuth eutectic alloy (LBE) cooled Accelerator Driven System (ADS), installation of experimental facility using LBE spallation target dedicated for ADS materials irradiation under flowing high temperature LBE environment is planned within the J-PARC project. JAEA has recently finalized the construction of “IMMORTAL”, a demonstrative test loop representing a 1:1 model of the above LBE spallation target system. Such facility pursues several different objectives such as studies on the thermal-hydraulic behavior of the target, and validation of the LBE physical properties, the pressure drops and the heat transfer correlations. These results will be useful for design of the facility and LBE target/cooled ADS. In the frame of a bi-lateral collaboration between JAEA and SCK•CEN, a benchmark exercise on the experimental results from IMMORTAL has been carried out. The calculations have been performed with RELAP5-3D System Thermal-Hydraulic code. To assess and predict the thermal-hydraulic behavior of its primary loop, RELAP5-3D calculation models have been configured. The calculated results from these models represented that a valid contribution towards the validation of the LBE properties and empirical correlations present in RELAP5-3D code.