• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.5
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• pp.1416-1428
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• 2021

Pebble flow characteristics can be significantly affected by the configuration of pebble bed, especially for HTGR pebble beds. How to achieve a desired uniform flow pattern without stagnation is the top priority for reactor design. Pebbles flows inside some specially designed pebble bed with arc-shaped contraction configurations at the bottom, including both concave-inward and convex-outward shapes are explored based on discrete element method. Flow characteristics including pebble retention, residence-time frequency density, flow uniformity as well as axial velocity are investigated. The results show that the traditionally designed pebble bed with cone-shape bottom is not the most preferred structure with respect to flow pattern for reactor design. By improving the contraction configuration, the flow performance can be significantly enhanced. The flow in the convex-shape configuration featured by uniformity, consistency and less stagnation, is much more desirable for pebble bed design. In contrast, when the shape is from convex-forward to concave-inward, the flow shows more nonuniformity and stagnation in the corner although the average cross-section axial velocity is the largest due to the dominant middle pebbles.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.2
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• pp.95-102
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• 2007

The conceptual design of the MIT modular pebble bed reactor is described. This reactor plant is a 250 Mwth, 120 Mwe indirect cycle plant that is designed to be deployed in the near term using demonstrated helium system components. The primary system is a conventional pebble bed reactor with a dynamic central column with an outlet temperature of 900 C providing helium to an intermediate helium to helium heat exchanger (IHX). The outlet of the IHX is input to a three shaft horizontal Brayton Cycle power conversion system. The design constraint used in sizing the plant is based on a factory modularity principle which allows the plant to be assembled 'Lego' style instead of constructed piece by piece. This principle employs space frames which contain the power conversion system that permits the Lego-like modules to be shipped by truck or train to sites. This paper also describes the research that has been conducted at MIT since 1998 on fuel modeling, silver leakage from coated fuel particles, dynamic simulation, MCNP reactor physics modeling and air ingress analysis.

• Proceedings of the KSME Conference
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• 2008.11b
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• pp.2088-2093
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• 2008

In this study, flow field measurement of the Pebble Bed Reactor(PBR) for the High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor(HTGR) was performed. Large number of pebbles in the core of PBR provides complicated flow channel. Due to the complicated geometries, numerical analysis has been intensively made rather than experimental observation. However, the justification of computational simulation by the experimental study is crucial to develop solid analysis of design method. In the present study, a wind tunnel installed with pebbles stacked was constructed and equipped with the Particle Image Velocimetry(PIV). We designed the system scaled up to realize the room temperature condition according to the similarity. The PIV observation gave us stagnation points, low speed region so that the suspected high temperature region can be identified. With the further supplementary experimental works, the present system may produce valuable data to justify the Computational Fluid Dynamics(CFD) simulation method.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.53 no.7
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• pp.2174-2183
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• 2021

Helium cooled solid breeder blanket as an important blanket candidate of the Tokamak fusion reactor uses ceramic pebble bed for tritium breeding. Considering the poor effective thermal conductivity of the ceramic breeder pebble bed, thin structure of tritium breeder pebble bed is usually adopted in the blanket design. The container wall has a great influence on the thin pebble bed packing structure, especially for the assembly of mono-sized particles, and thin pebble bed will appear anisotropic effective thermal conductivity phenomenon. In this paper, thin ceramic pebble beds composed of 1 mm diameter Li₄SiO₄ particles are generated by the EDEM 2.7. The effective thermal conductivity of different thickness pebble beds in the three-dimensional directions are analyzed by three-dimensional thermal network method. It is observed that thin Li₄SiO₄ pebble bed showing anisotropic effective thermal conductivity under the practical design size. Normally, the effective thermal conductivity along the bed vertical direction is higher than the horizontal direction due to the gravity effect. As the thickness increases from 10 mm to 40 mm, the effective thermal conductivity of the pebble bed gradually increases.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.9
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• pp.3450-3463
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• 2023

In the two-step analysis of Pebble-Bed type High-Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor (PB-HTGR), the lattice physics calculation for the generation of homogenized cross-sections is based on the fuel pebble. However, the randomly-dispersed fuel particles in the fuel pebble introduce double heterogeneity and randomness. Compared to the deterministic method, the Monte Carlo method which is flexible in geometry modeling provides a high-fidelity treatment. Therefore, the Monte Carlo code NECP-MCX is extended in this study to perform the lattice physics calculation of the PB-HTGR. Firstly, the capability for the simulation of randomly-dispersed media, using the explicit modeling approach, is developed in NECP-MCX. Secondly, the capability for the generation of the homogenized cross-section is also developed in NECP-MCX. Finally, simplified PB-HTGR problems are calculated by a two-step neutronics analysis tool based on Monte Carlo homogenization. For the pebble beds mixed by fuel pebble and graphite pebble, the bias is less than 100 pcm when compared to the high-fidelity model, and the bias is increased to 269 pcm for pebble bed mixed by depleted fuel pebble. Numerical results show that the Monte Carlo lattice physics calculation for the two-step analysis of PB-HTGR is feasible.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.54 no.1
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• pp.357-373
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• 2022

The high-temperature gas-cooled reactor pebble-bed module project is the first commercial Generation-IV NPP(Nuclear Power Plant) in China. A new joint is used for the vertical support of RPV(Reactor Pressure Vessel). The steel corbel is integrally embedded into the reactor-cabin wall through eight asymmetrically arranged pre-stressed high-strength bolts, achieving the different path transmission of shear force and moment. The vertical monotonic loading test of two specimens is conducted. The results show that the failure mode of the joint is bolt fracture. There is no prominent yield stage in the whole loading process. The stress of bolts is linearly distributed along the height of corbel at initial loading. As the load increases, the height of neutral axis of bolts gradually decreases. The upper and lower edges of the wall opening contact the corbel plate to restrict the rotation of the corbel. During the loading, the pre-stress of some bolts decreases. The increase of the pre-stress strength ratio of bolts has no noticeable effect on the structure stiffness, but it reduces the ultimate bearing capacity of the joint. A simplified calculation model for the elastic stage of the joint is established, and the estimation results are in good agreement with the experimental results.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.1
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• pp.339-352
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• 2023

Prediction of the time-related traits of pebble flow inside pebble-bed HTGRs is of great significance for reactor operation and design. In this work, an image-driven approach with the aid of a convolutional neural network (CNN) is proposed to predict the remaining time of initially loaded pebbles and the time interval of paired flow images of the pebble bed. Two types of strategies are put forward: one is adding FC layers to the classic classification CNN models and using regression training, and the other is CNN-based deep expectation (DEX) by regarding the time prediction as a deep classification task followed by softmax expected value refinements. The current dataset is obtained from the discrete element method (DEM) simulations. Results show that the CNN-aided models generally make satisfactory predictions on the remaining time with the determination coefficient larger than 0.99. Among these models, the VGG19+DEX performs the best and its CumScore (proportion of test set with prediction error within 0.5s) can reach 0.939. Besides, the remaining time of additional test sets and new cases can also be well predicted, indicating good generalization ability of the model. In the task of predicting the time interval of image pairs, the VGG19+DEX model has also generated satisfactory results. Particularly, the trained model, with promising generalization ability, has demonstrated great potential in accurately and instantaneously predicting the traits of interest, without the need for additional computational intensive DEM simulations. Nevertheless, the issues of data diversity and model optimization need to be improved to achieve the full potential of the CNN-aided prediction tool.

• 유체기계공업학회:학술대회논문집
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• 2005.12a
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• pp.244-249
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• 2005

Flow distribution and pressure drop analysis for an inlet plenum of a Pebble Bed Modular Reactor (PBMR) have been performed using Computational Fluid Dynamics. Three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations have been solved in conjunction with $k-{\epsilon}$ model as a turbulence closure. Non-uniformity in flow distribution is assessed for the reference case and parametric studies have been performed for rising channels diameter, Reynolds number and angle between the inlet ports. Also, two different shapes of the inlet plenum namely, rectangular shape and oval shape, have been analysed. The relative flow mal-distribution parameter shows that the flow distribution in the rising channels for the reference case is strongly non-uniform. As the rising channels diameter decreases, the uniformity in the flow distribution as well as the pressure drop inside the inlet plenum increases. Reynolds number is found to have no effect on the flow distribution in the rising channels for both the shapes of the inlet plenum. The increase in angle between the inlet ports makes the flow distribution in the rising channels more uniform.

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2001.10a
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• pp.115-115
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• 2001

• Proceedings of the Korean Nuclear Society Conference
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• 2005.05a
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• pp.45-46
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• 2005