Abstract
In an economically improved sodium-cooled fast reactor, a narrower gap is considered among the fuel pins so as to achieve a high burn-up. Therefore, it is needed to evaluate thermal-hydraulic characteristics in case of a change of the gap geometry due to deformation of fuel pin caused by such as a swelling and a thermal bowing. For this purpose, a FEM analysis code, SPIRAL has been being developed in JAEA and the code validations using water or sodium experimental results have also being performed. In this study, a numerical analysis of a flow field around wire-wrapped fuel pins based on a 3-pin bundle water experiment was carried out as a validation study of SPIRAL. As a result, it was demonstrated that the hybrid-type turbulent model incorporated in SPIRAL has a high applicability to investigate the flow structure of the narrow gap in the fuel assembly.
