• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.2 no.1
• /
• pp.19-25
• /
• 1970

A study was conducted on the coolant mixing between water flowing in two adjacent subchannels. Measurements were made of the quantity of mass transferred between a larger rectangular channel and a smaller triangular channel in a 19-rod fuel bundle under the conditions of single phase flow and air-water two-phase flow. The results of the experiments showed that the low mixing rate appears in single phase flow, and high mixing rate was measured in air-water two-phase flow Mixing rate decreases with the increasing of air void fraction during the air-water flow. It seems that the high mixing rate in the air-water flow was caused due to adequate agitation of the chaotic air void.

• The KSFM Journal of Fluid Machinery
• /
• v.17 no.6
• /
• pp.89-94
• /
• 2014

The 4th generation SFR is being designed with a milestone of construction by 2028. It is important to understand the subchannel flow characteristics in fuel assembly through the experimental investigations and to estimate the calculation uncertainties for insuring the confidence of the design code calculation results. The friction coefficient and the mixing coefficient are selected as primary parameters. The two parameters are related to the flow distribution and diffusion. To identify the flow distribution, an iso-kinetic method was developed based on the previous study. For the mixing parameters, a wire mesh system and a laser induced fluorescence methods were developed in parallel. The measuring systems were adopted on 37 rod bundle test geometry, which was developed based on the Euler number scaling. A scaling method for a design of experimental facility and the experimental identification techniques for the flow distribution and mixing parameters were developed based on the measurement requirement.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers Conference
• /
• 2001.11a
• /
• pp.19-26
• /
• 2001

The wear characteristic of Zircaloy-4 tube, which is used for a cladding of light water reactor fuel rod, is investigated experimentally. The experiment is conducted with contacting the crossed tube specimens in air as well as in water at room temperature with various combination of contact normal force and sliding distance of reciprocating motion. The contour and the volume of each wear are examined to study the effect of contact condition and environment on wear. As a result, it is found that the wear volume in the water environment is larger than that in the air for all the contact (i.e., force and sliding distance) conditions. However, the wear depth is greater in air than in water if the contact normal force and the sliding distance are larger. These are explained by the ease of detachment of wear particles from the contact surface. On the other hand, workrate model is applied with the contact shear force range measured by our wear tester. Investigated is the correlation between the workrate and the wear volume increase rate of the present experiment. The parabolic curve is found to fit well for the present wear data.

• Journal of KSNVE
• /
• v.5 no.1
• /
• pp.95-106
• /
• 1995

Flow-induced vibration in heat exchanger (or fuel rod) in nuclar power plant can cause dynamic interactions between tubes and tube supports resulting in fretting-wear. To increase the reliability and design life of heat exchanger components, design criteria that establish acceptable limits of vibration and minimize fretting wear are necessary. The fretting-wear rate is dependent upon material combination, contact configuration, environmental conditions and tube-to tube support dynamic interaction. It is demostrated that the fretting -wear rate correlates well with tube-to-support contact force or work rate. The tube-to-support dynamic interaction, which consists of dynamic contact forces and tube motion, is used to relate single-span wear data to real heat exchanger configurations consisting of multi-span tube bundles. This paper describes the test facility to measure tube-to-support dynamic impact force and reports its dynamic characteristics through the four impact tests - a force transduces independent and external impact tests, central ring inside impact test and additional cylinder impact test. Through the tests the impact parameter change dependent upon the material difference of impacting ball is studied, and the impact parameters of Force Transducer Assembly components are measured. And also the dynamic behavior of Force Transducer Assembly is analyzed. The force measurement technique herein is shown to provide a reasonable measure of dynamic contact forces.

• Korean Journal of Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Engineering
• /
• v.23 no.2
• /
• pp.132-138
• /
• 2011

In the present article, we investigate numerically turbulent flow of air through compound rectangular channels. Large eddy simulation(LES) is employed for unsteady turbulence modeling. LES gives better predictions for the axial mean velocity distribution than those of other turbulent models. Strong large-scale quasi-periodic flow oscillations are observed in most of the geometries investigated. Such large-scale flow oscillations in compound rectangular channels are similar to the quasi-periodic flow pulsation through the gaps between fuel rod bundle in nuclear reactor. It exists in any longitudinal connecting gap between two flow channels. The frequency of this flow oscillation is determined by the geometry of the gap. The large scale cross motions through the rectangular compound channels induce significant heat transfer enhancement of the compound channel flow.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.153-162
• /
• 1980

The investigation of the fuel cladding temperature behavior and heat transfer mechanism during the reflooding phase of a LOCA plays an important role in performance evaluation of ECCS and safety analysis of water reactors. Reflooding experiments were performed with horizontal and vertical flow channels to investigate the effect of coolant flow channel orientation on rewetting process. Emphasis was mainly placed on the CANDU reactor which has horizontal pressure tubes in core, and the results were compared with those of vertical channel. Also to investigate the rewetting process visually, the experiments by using a rod in annulus and a quartz tube heated outside were performed. It can be concluded that the rewetting velocity in horizontal flow channel is clearly affected by flow stratification, however, the average rewetting velocity is similar to those in vertical flow channel for same conditions.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.22 no.1
• /
• pp.45-57
• /
• 1990

A steady-state margin comparison study was performed between analog and digital protection systems. The systems compared are the thermal overpower and overtemperature delta T system of Westinghouse, and Core Protection Calculator System of Combustion Engineering, Inc. No dynamic offset was considered to eliminate the margin differences by different safety analysis methodologies. The result shows that the digital protection system has about 30% more rated power margin than the analog system in protecting against the fuel rod centerline melting. The digital protection system is shown to have almost same margin with the analog protection system in preventing the DNB at EOC (End of Cycle) even if the digital protection system has about 10% more margin at BOC(Beginning of Cycle).

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
• /
• 1997.05b
• /
• pp.445-450
• /
• 1997

Self-Powered Neutron Detectors(SPNDs) are currently used to estimate the power generation distribution and fuel burn-up in several nuclear power reactors in Korea. In this paper, Monte Carlo simulation is accomplished to calculate the escape probability of beta particle as a function of their birth position fur the typical geometry of rhodium-based SPNDs. Also, a simple numerical method calculates the initial generation rate of beta particles and the change of generation rate due to rhodium burn-up. Using the simulation and the numerical method, the burn-up profile of rhodium density and the neutron sensitivity are calculated as a function of burn-up time in the reactor. The sensitivity of the SPNDs decreases non-linearly due to the high absorption cross-section and the non-uniform burn-up of rhodium in the emitter rod. In addition, for improvement of some properties of rhodium-based SPNDs which are currently used, this paper presents a new material. The method used here can be applied to the analysis of other types of SPNDs and will be useful in the optimum design of new SPNDs for long term usage.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.53 no.2
• /
• pp.430-438
• /
• 2021

The spatial distribution of neutron flux or reaction rate was calculated by cell or mesh tally in traditional Monte Carlo simulation. However, either cell or mesh tally leads to the increase of memory consumption and simulation time. In this paper, the function expansion tally (FET) method was developed in Reactor Monte Carlo code RMC to solve this problem. The FET method was applied to the tallies of neutron flux distributions of uranium block and PWR fuel rod models. Legendre polynomials were used in the axial direction, while Zernike polynomials were used in the radial direction. The results of flux, calculation time and memory consumption of different expansion orders were investigated, and compared with the mesh tally. Results showed that the continuous distribution of flux can be obtained by FET method. The flux distributions were consistent with that of mesh tally, while the memory consumption and simulation time can be effectively reduced. Finally, the convergence analysis of coefficients of polynomials were performed, and the selection strategy of FET order was proposed based on the statistics uncertainty of the coefficients. The proposed method can help to determine the order of FET, which was meaningful for the efficiency and accuracy of FET method.

• Journal of the Korean Society of Systems Engineering
• /
• v.16 no.2
• /
• pp.38-46
• /
• 2020

The accurate measurement of critical heat flux (CHF) in flow boiling is important for the safety requirement of the nuclear power plant to prevent sharp degradation of the convective heat transfer between the surface of the fuel rod cladding and the reactor coolant. In this paper, a System Engineering approach is used to develop a model that predicts the CHF using machine learning. The model is built using artificial neural network (ANN). The model is then trained, tested and validated using pre-existing database for different flow conditions. The Talos library is used to tune the model by optimizing the hyper parameters and selecting the best network architecture. Once developed, the ANN model can predict the CHF based solely on a set of input parameters (pressure, mass flux, quality and hydraulic diameter) without resorting to any physics-based model. It is intended to use the developed model to predict the DNBR under a large break loss of coolant accident (LBLOCA) in APR1400. The System Engineering approach proved very helpful in facilitating the planning and management of the current work both efficiently and effectively.