Preliminary calculations of Coolant Flow in a SCWR Fuel Assembly with the Code ANSYS CFX 10.0

摘要

For the design of Supercritical-Water Cooled Reactors (SCWRs) it is important to get know the thermal phenomena and the flow field in the different fuel assembly concepts. The ANSYS CFX 10.0 commercial CFD code used by our Institute should be a powerful tool for investigating this field. The specific feature of the supercritical heat transfer is that the material properties alter shapely in a specific temperature range around the so-called pseudo-critical temperature. Because of this specific feature, we had to validate the CFX 10.0 code whether it is capable for handling the heat transfer phenomena for supercritical state fluids. The calculations of a 2950 mm long straight pipe model were compared with measurement data and the prediction of the Swenson correlation recommended by international literature. After the validation, three different sub-channel models were developed based on the European SCWR fuel assembly concept. Several calculations were performed with these sub-channel models for different boundary conditions. The results of the abovementioned investigations are presented in this paper.