The first results from the ACOPO experiment

The ACOPO experiment simulates natural convection heat transfer from volumetrically heated pools, at a half-scale reactor lower head geometry (hemispherical). Data for Rayleigh numbers of up to 2·1016, from the first round of experiments, are presented in this paper. The results are in substantial agreement with those of the mini-ACOPO proof-of-concept experiment. Moreover, it is shown that these ACOPO results confirm a key component of the in-vessel retention capability for an AP600-like design, as recently established in DOE/ID-10460.