• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.52 no.10
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• pp.2204-2220
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• 2020

An open-pool type research reactor is designed and operated considering the accessibility around the pool top area to enhance the reactor utilization. The reactor structure assembly is placed at the bottom of the pool and filled with water as a primary coolant for the core cooling and radiation shielding. Most radioactive materials are generated from the fuel assemblies in the reactor core and circulated with the primary coolant. If the primary coolant goes up to the pool surface, the radiation level increases around the working area near the top of the pool. Hence, the hot water layer is designed and formed at the upper part of the pool to suppress the rising of the primary coolant to the pool surface. The temperature gradient is established from the hot water layer to the primary coolant. As this temperature gradient suppresses the circulation of the primary coolant at the upper region of the pool, the radioactive primary coolant rising up directly to the pool surface is minimized. Water mixing between these layers is reduced because the hot water layer is formed above the primary coolant with a higher temperature. The radiation level above the pool surface area is maintained as low as reasonably achievable since the radioactive materials in the primary coolant are trapped under the hot water layer. The key to maintaining the stable hot water layer and keeping the radiation level low on the pool surface is to have a stable flow of the primary coolant. In the research reactor with a downward core flow, the primary coolant is dumped into the reactor pool and goes to the reactor core through the flow guide structure. Flow fields of the primary coolant at the lower region of the reactor pool are largely affected by the dumped primary coolant. Simple, circular, and duct type discharge headers are designed to control the flow fields and make the primary coolant flow stable in the reactor pool. In this research, flow fields of the primary coolant and hot water layer are numerically simulated in the reactor pool. The heat transfer rate, temperature, and velocity fields are taken into consideration to determine the formation of the stable hot water layer and primary coolant flow. The bulk Richardson number is used to evaluate the stability of the flow field. A duct type discharge header is finally chosen to dump the primary coolant into the reactor pool. The bulk Richardson number should be higher than 2.7 and the temperature of the hot water layer should be 1 ℃ higher than the temperature of the primary coolant to maintain the stability of the stratified thermal layer.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.55 no.4
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• pp.1555-1562
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• 2023

Natural circulation phenomena have been nowadays largely revisited aiming to investigate the performances of passive safety systems in carrying-out heat removal under accidental conditions. For this purpose, assessment studies using CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) and also 3D thermal-hydraulic system codes are considered at different levels of the design and safety demonstration issues. However, these tools have not being extensively validated for specific natural circulation flow regimes involving flow mixing, temperature stratification, flow recirculation and instabilities. In the present study, an experimental test case based on a small-scale pool test rig experiment performed by Korea Atomic Energy Research Institute, is considered for code-to-code and code-to-experimental data comparison. The test simulation is carried out using the FLUENT and the 3D thermal-hydraulic system CATHARE-2 codes. The objective is to evaluate and compare their prediction capabilities with respect to the test conditions of the experiment. It was observed that, notwithstanding their numerical and modelling differences, similar agreement results are obtained. Nevertheless, additional investigations efforts are still needed for a better representation of the considered phenomena.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.39 no.4
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• pp.299-312
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• 2007

The program on thermal-hydraulic evaluation by testing and analysis (THETA) for the development and licensing of the new design features in the APR1400 (Advanced Power Reactor-1400) is briefly introduced with a presentation on the research motivation and typical results of the separate effect tests and analyses of the major design features. The first part deals with multi-dimensional phenomena related to the safety analysis of the APR1400. One research area is related to the multidimensional behavior of the safety injection (SI) water in a reactor pressure vessel downcomer that uses a direct vessel injection type of SI system. The other area is associated with the condensation of steam jets and the resultant thermal mixing in a water pool; these phenomena are relevant to the depressurization of a reactor coolant system (RCS). The second part describes our efforts to develop new components for safety enhancements, such as a fluidic device as a passive SI flow controller and a sparger to depressurize the RCS. This work contributes to an understanding of the new thermal-hydraulic phenomena that are relevant to advanced reactor system designs; it also improves the prediction capabilities of analysis tools for multi-dimensional flow behavior, especially in complicated geometries.

• Fire Science and Engineering
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.20-29
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• 2013

To investigate numerically the effects of geometry and location of vertical opening on the thermal and chemical fire characteristics in full-scale under-ventilated compartment fires, the ventilation factor ($A\sqrt{h}$) to estimate a theoretical maximum inflow of ambient air and the mass loss rate in a heptane pool fire were fixed for all cases. It was shown that variations in door geometry affected significantly the change in thermal and chemical characteristics inside the compartment. Variations in window location resulted in the complex change in additional fire characteristics including the fire duration time and recirculating flow structure. These results were analyzed in details by the multi-dimensional flow and fire characteristics including the vent flow and fuel/air mixing phenomena.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.42 no.6
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• pp.636-655
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• 2010

A thermal-hydraulic code, named CUPID, has been being developed for the realistic analysis of transient two-phase flows in nuclear reactor components. The CUPID code development was motivated from very practical needs, including the analyses of a downcomer boiling, a two-phase flow mixing in a pool, and a two-phase flow in a direct vessel injection system. The CUPID code adopts a two-fluid, three-field model for two-phase flows, and the governing equations are solved over unstructured grids with a semi-implicit two-step method. This paper presents an overview of the CUPID code development and assessment strategy. It also presents the code couplings with a system code, MARS, and, a three-dimensional reactor kinetics code, MASTER.

• Nuclear Engineering and Technology
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• v.46 no.5
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• pp.655-666
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• 2014

The CUPID code has been developed at KAERI for a transient, three-dimensional analysis of a two-phase flow in light water nuclear reactor components. It can provide both a component-scale and a CFD-scale simulation by using a porous media or an open media model for a two-phase flow. In this paper, recent advances in the CUPID code are presented in three sections. First, the domain decomposition parallel method implemented in the CUPID code is described with the parallel efficiency test for multiple processors. Then, the coupling of CUPID-MARS via heat structure is introduced, where CUPID has been coupled with a system-scale thermal-hydraulics code, MARS, through the heat structure. The coupled code has been applied to a multi-scale thermal-hydraulic analysis of a pool mixing test. Finally, CUPID-SG is developed for analyzing two-phase flows in PWR steam generators. Physical models and validation results of CUPID-SG are discussed.

• Journal of the Korean Solar Energy Society
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• v.35 no.2
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• pp.53-62
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• 2015

Boiling heat transfer characteristic is very important in the various industries such as solar thermal system, power generation, heat exchangers, cooling of high-power electronics components and cooling of nuclear reactors. Therefore, in this study, boiling heat transfer characteristics such as critical heat flux (CHF) and heat transfer coefficient under the pool boiling state were tested using graphene nanofluids. Graphene used in this study, which have the same thermal conductivity but with different sizes. The experimental results showed that the highest the CHF and boiling heat transfer coefficient increase ratio for graphene nanofluids was at the 0.01 vol.%. At the present juncture, the CHF and boiling heat transfer coefficient increase ratio of the small-sized graphene nanofluids was higher than the large-sized graphene nanofluids.

• Journal of computational fluids engineering
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• v.20 no.4
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• pp.14-20
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• 2015

Without electirc power to cool down the hot reactor core, passive systems utilizing natural circulation are becoming a big specialty of recent neculear systems after the severe accident in Fukusima. When we consider the natural circulation in a pool, thermal mixing phenomena may start from single phase circulation and can continue to two phase condition. Since the CUPID code, which has been developed for two-phase flow analysis, can deal with the phase transition phenomena, the CUPID would be pertinent to natural convection problems in single- and two-phase conditions. Thus, the CUPID should be validated against single- and two-phase natural circulation phenomena. For the first step of the validation process, this study is focused on the validation of single-phase natural circulation. Moreover, the CUPID code solves the fluid properties by the relationship to pressure and temperature from the steam table considering non-condensable gas effects, so that the effects from variable properties are included. Simple square thermal cavity problems are tested for laminar and turbulent conditions against numerical and experimental data. Throughout the investigation, it is found that the variable properties can affect the flow field in laminar condition, but the effect becomes weak in turbulence condition, and the CUPID code implementing steam table is capable of analyzing single phase natural circualtion phenomena.

• Journal of Wetlands Research
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• v.14 no.1
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• pp.75-87
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• 2012

Hyporheic zone is a region beneath and alongside a stream, river, or lake bed, where there is mixing of shallow groundwater and surfacewater. Hyporheic exchange controls a variety of physical, biogeochemical and thermal processes, and provides unique ecotones in a aquatic ecosystem. Field and experimental observations, and modeling studies indicate that hyporheic exchange is mainly in response to pressure gradients driven by the geomorphological features of stream beds. In the reach scale of a stream, pool-riffle structures dominate the exchange patterns. Flow over a pool-riffle sequence develops recirculation zones and stagnation points, and this flow structures make irregular pressure gradient which is driving force of the hyporheic exchange. In this study, 3 D hydro-dynamic model solves the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations for the surface water and Darcy's Law and the continuity equation for ground water. The two sets of equations are coupled via the pressure distribution along the interface. Simulation results show that recirculation zones and stagnation points in the pool-riffle structures dominantly control the upwelling and downwelling patterns. With decrease of recirculation zones, length of donwelling zone formed in front of riffles is reduced and position of maximum downwelling point moves downward. The numerical simulation could successfully predict the behavior of hyporheic exchange and contribute the field study, river management and restoration.

• International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics Korean Journal of Geophysical Research
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• v.25 no.1
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• pp.57-81
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• 1997

Numerical prediction of nocturnal thermal high in summer of the 1995 near Taegu city located in a basin has been carried out by a non-hydrostatic numerical model over complex terrain through one-way double nesting technique in the Z following coordinate system. Under the prevailing westerly winds, vertical turbulent fluxes of momentum and heat over mountains for daytime hours are quite strong with a large magnitude of more than $120W/\textrm{m}^2$, but a small one of $5W/\textrm{m}^2$ at the surface of the basin. Convective boundary layer (CBL) is developed with a thickness of about 600m over the ground in the lee side of Mt. Hyungje, and extends to the edge of inland at the interface of land sea in the east. Sensible heat flux near the surface of the top of the mountain is $50W/\textrm{m}^2$, but its flux in the basin is almost zero. Convergence of sensible heat flux occurs from the ground surface toward the atmosphere in the lower layer, causing the layer over the mountain to be warmed up, but no convergance of the flux over the basin results from the significant mixing of air within the CBL. As horizontal transport of sensible heat flux from the top of the mountain toward over the basin results in the continuous accumulation of heat with time, enhancing air temperature at the surface of the basin, especially Taegu city to be higher than $39.3^{\circ}C$. Since latent heat fluxes are $270W/\textrm{m}^2$ near the top of the mountain and $300W/\textrm{m}^2$ along the slope of the mountain and the basin, evaporation of water vapor from the surface of the basin is much higher than one from the mountain and then, horizontal transport of latent heat flux is from the basin toward the mountain, showing relative humidity of 65 to 75% over the mountain to be much greater than 50% to 55% in the basin. At night, sensible heat fluxes have negative values of $-120W/\textrm{m}^2$ along the slope near the top of the mountain and $-50W/\textrm{m}^2$ at the surface of the basin, which indicate gain of heat from the lower atmosphere. Nighttime radiative cooling produces a shallow nocturnal surface inversion layer with a thickness of about 100m, which is much lower than common surface inversion layer, and lifts extremely heated air masses for daytime hours, namely, a warm pool of $34^{\circ}C$ to be isolated over the ground surface in the basin. As heat transfer from the warm pool in the lower atmosphere toward the ground of the basin occurs, the air near the surface of the basin does not much cool down, resulting in the persistence of high temperature at night, called nocturnal thermal high or tropical night. High relative humidity of 75% is found at the surface of the basin under the moderate wind, while slightly low relative humidity of 60% is along the eastern slope of the high mountain, due to adiabatic heating by the srong downslope wind. Air temperature near the surface of the basin with high moisture in the evening does not get lower than that during the day and the high temperature produces nocturnal warming situation.