A Secondary Flow Effect on the Heat and Mass Transfer Processes in the Finned Rod Bundles of Gas-cooled Reactors

• Main Authors: A. A. Dunaitsev, V. I. Solonin
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: MGTU im. N.È. Baumana 2017-01-01
• Series: Nauka i Obrazovanie
• Subjects: per channel model; secondary flow; numerical simulation; beam rods
• Online Access: http://technomag.edu.ru/jour/article/view/1114

<p>In nuclear power engineering a need to justify an operability of products and their components is of great importance. In high-temperature gas reactors, the critical element affecting the facility reliability is the fuel rod cladding, which in turn leads to the need to gain knowledge in the field of gas dynamics and heat transfer in the reactor core and to increase the detail of the calculation results. For the time being, calculations of reactor core are performed using the proven techniques of per-channel calculations, which show good representativeness and count rate. However, these techniques require additional experimental studies to describe correctly the inter-channel exchange, which, being taken into account, largely affects the pattern of the temperature fields in the region under consideration. Increasingly more relevant and demandable are numerical simulation methods of fluid and gas dynamics, as well as of heat exchange, which consist in the direct solution of the system of differential equations of mass balance, kinetic moment, and energy. Calculation of reactor cores or rod bundles according these techniques does not require additional experimental studies and allows us to obtain the local distributions of flow characteristics in the bundle and the flow characteristics that are hard to measure in the physical experiment.</p><p>The article shows the calculation results and their analysis for an infinite rod lattice of the reactor core. The results were obtained by the technique of modelling one rod of a regular lattice using the periodic boundary conditions, followed by translating the results to the neighbouring rods. In channels of complex shape, there are secondary flows caused by changes in the channel geometry along the flow and directed across the main front of the flow. These secondary flows in the reactor cores with rods spaced by the winding wire lead to a redistribution of the coolant along the channel section, which in turn results in a heat flow from the more heated rods to the less heated ones. The largest vector values of the transversal velocity are observed near the rod surface immediately behind the fin that passes in the section under consideration. These features lead to the exchange of mass and heat between the conjugate cells of the bundle of rods. The distribution of the transversal velocity in the gap between the rods has a periodic saw-tooth pattern, which can be justified by the fact that the fins pass periodically through the gap. Thus, the maximum of the flow is achieved immediately after passing the fins through the gap when the maximum transverse velocities can be observed directly behind the fins, and the minimum occurs when the fins move to meet each other, and before the fins in the gap is formed a region with the minimum values of the transversal velocity.</p>