Abstract—The natural circulation loop is one of the design concepts of a cooling system in new advanced reactors that has attracted many researchers to develop it. This study aimed to perceive the effect of horizontal width variation on the thermal behavior of a single-phase Natural Circulation Loop (NCL). NCL apparatus with a vertical heater and a vertical cooler was designed for experimental study. The height of the loop was 100 cm while the width of the loop was varied at 50 cm and 100 cm. The heater was designed using Nichrome wire on the outside of the stainless pipe while the cooler was designed using pipe-in-pipe with water flowing through the annulus. Arduino microcontroller and K-type thermocouple sensors were used in temperature data acquisition. XAMPP software was used in data recording. The results of this study indicated that the loop of a 100 cm width has a difference in the temperature of the fluid coming out of the heater and entering the heater that reaches 156,0% higher than the loop of a 50 cm width at the same input voltage. This study is supposed to be one of the references for a single-phase natural circulation loop. 

Index Terms—natural circulation, single-phase, temperature, width variation

Cite: Duwi Hariyanto and Sidik Permana, "Experimental Investigation of Natural Circulation in a Single-Phase Loop with Different Widths," International Journal of Electronics and Electrical Engineering, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 24-30, June 2020. doi: 10.18178/ijeee.8.2.24-30