Nuclear Engineering and Technology

Korean Nuclear Society (한국원자력학회)
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Numerical study of the flow and heat transfer characteristics in a scale model of the vessel cooling system for the HTTR

  • Received : 2023.07.10
  • Accepted : 2023.11.19
  • Published : 2024.04.25
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Abstract

The reactor cavity cooling system (RCCS) is a passive reactor safety system commonly present in the designs of High-Temperature Gas-cooled Reactors (HTGR) that removes heat from the reactor pressure vessel by means of natural convection and radiation. It is one of the factors responsible for ensuring that the reactor does not melt down under any plausible accident scenario. For the simulation of accident scenarios, which are transient phenomena unfolding over a span of up to several days, intermediate fidelity methods and system codes must be employed to limit the models' execution time. These models can quantify radiation heat transfer well, but heat transfer caused by natural convection must be quantified with the use of correlations for the heat transfer coefficient. It is difficult to obtain reliable correlations for HTGR RCCS heat transfer coefficients experimentally due to such a system's size. They could, however, be obtained from high-fidelity steady-state simulations of RCCSs. The Rayleigh number in RCCSs is too high for using a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) technique; thus, a Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) approach must be employed. There are many RANS models, each performing best under different geometry and fluid flow conditions. To find the most suitable one for simulating an RCCS, the RANS models need to be validated. This work benchmarks various RANS models against three experiments performed on the HTTR RCCS Mockup by the Japanese Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA) in 1993. This facility is a 1/6 scale model of a vessel cooling system (VCS) for the High Temperature Engineering Test Reactor (HTTR), which is operated by JAEA. Multiple RANS models were evaluated on a simplified 2d-axisymmetric geometry. They were found to reproduce the experimental temperature profiles with errors of up to 22% for the lowest temperature benchmark and 15% for the higher temperature benchmarks. The results highlight that the pragmatic turbulence models need to be validated for high Rayleigh natural convection-driven flows and improved accordingly, more publicly available experimental data of RCCS resembling experiments is needed and indicate that a 2d-axisymmetric geometry approximation is likely insufficient to capture all the relevant phenomena in RCCS simulations.

Keywords

Acknowledgement

The simulations presented in this paper were performed at the Swierk Computing Centre in the Department of Complex Systems at the National Centre for Nuclear Research, Poland. This work is part of the studies in the strategic Polish program of scientific research and development work "Social and economic development of Poland in the conditions of globalizing markets GOSPOSTRATEG", part of "Preparation of legal, organizational and technical instruments for the HTR implementation" financed by the National Centre for Research and Development (NCBiR) in Poland. M.J. is a recipient of scholarships within the framework of the project New Reactor Concepts and Safety Analyses for the Polish Nuclear Energy Program (POWR.03.02.00-00- I005/17) implemented under the Operational Programme Knowledge Education Development 2014-2020 co-financed by the European Social Fund.

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