CFD Analysis of Core Bypass Flow and Crossflow in the Prismatic Very High Temperature Gas-cooled Nuclear Reactor

• Main Author: Wang, Huhu 1985-
• Other Authors: Hassan, Yassin A
• Format: Others
• Published: 2013
• Subjects: Crossflow; Bypass flow; Prismatic VHTR
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1969.1/148310

Very High Temperature Rector (VHTR) had been designated as one of those promising reactors for the Next Generation (IV) Nuclear Plant (NGNP). For a prismatic core VHTR, one of the most crucial design considerations is the bypass flow and crossflow effect. The bypass flow occurs when the coolant flow into gaps between fuel blocks. These gaps are formed as a result of carbon expansion and shrinkage induced by radiations and manufacturing and installation errors. Hot spots may appear in the core if the large portion of the coolant flows into bypass gaps instead of coolant channels in which the cooling efficiency is much higher. A preliminary three dimensional steady-state CFD analysis was performed with commercial code STARCCM+ 6.04 to investigate the bypass flow and crossflow phenomenon in the prismatic VHTR core. The k-ε turbulence model was selected because of its robustness and low computational cost with respect to a decent accuracy for varied flow patterns. The wall treatment used in the present work is two-layer all y+ wall treatment to blend the wall laws to estimate the shear stress. Uniform mass flow rate was chose as the inlet condition and the outlet condition was zero gauge pressure outlet. Grid independence study was performed and the results indicated that the discrepancy of the solution due to the mesh density was within 2% of the bypass flow fraction. The computational results showed that the bypass flow fraction was around 12%. Furthermore, the presence of the crossflow gap resulted in a up to 28% reduction of the coolant in the bypass flow gap while mass flow rate of coolant in coolant channels increased by around 5%. The pressure drop at the inlet due to the sudden contraction in area could be around 1kpa while the value was about 180 Pa around the crossflow gap region. The error analysis was also performed to evaluate the accumulated errors from the process of discretization and iteration. It was found that the total error was around 4% and the variation for the bypass flow fraction was within 1%.