Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Experimental and numerical assessment of helium bubble lift during natural circulation for passive molten salt fast reactor

  • Won Jun Choi (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Jae Hyung Park (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Juhyeong Lee (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Jihun Im (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Yunsik Cho (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hanyang University) ;
  • Yonghee Kim (Department of Nuclear and Quantum Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology) ;
  • Sung Joong Kim (Department of Nuclear Engineering, Hanyang University)
  • Received : 2023.06.29
  • Accepted : 2023.12.04
  • Published : 2024.03.25
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Abstract

To remove insoluble fission products, which could possibly cause reactor instability and significantly reduce heat transfer efficiency from primary system of molten salt reactor, a helium bubbling method is employed into a passive molten salt fast reactor. In this regard, two-phase flow behavior of molten salt and helium bubbles was investigated experimentally because the helium bubbles highly affect the circulation performance of working fluid owing to an additional drag force. As the helium flow rate is controlled, the change of key thermal-hydraulic parameters was analyzed through a two-phase experiment. Simultaneously, to assess the applicability of numerical model for the analysis of two-phase flow behavior, the numerical calculation was performed using the OpenFOAM 9.0 code. The accuracy of the numerical analysis code was evaluated by comparing it with the experimental data. Generally, numerical results showed a good agreement with the experiment. However, at the high helium injection rates, the prediction capability for void fraction of helium bubbles was relatively low. This study suggests that the multiphaseEulerFoam solver in OpenFOAM code is effective for predicting the helium bubbling but there exists a room for further improvement by incorporating the appropriate drag flux model and the population balance equation.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) and funded by the ministry of Science, ICT, and Future Planning, Republic of Korea (grant numbers NRF-2021M2D2A2076382). Additionally, this work was also supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by the Korea government (MSIT) (RS-2023-00261295).

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