Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : The 30th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE30)
Date : May 21, 2023 - May 26, 2023
Lead-based cooled fast reactor (LFR) has been considered as one of the most promising concepts for GEN IV nuclear systems. Due to its intrinsic safety and good neutron economy, LFR has a great prospect in reactor miniaturization and modularization. Different from PWR, peak cladding temperature should be the most important safety limit in the thermal-hydraulic design of LFR. And sub-channel analysis is a frequently used method to obtain the distribution of coolant and cladding temperature. In this study, a refined sub-channel analysis code available for lead-bismuth eutectic （LBE） coolant, STAR-PB, is developed. Fundamentally, physical properties, heat transfer correlations, pressure drop models and turbulent mixing models were investigated and implemented into the code. In view of high thermal conductivity of lead-based coolant, its lateral thermal conduction effect was also taken into account. Moreover, considering that wire spacer is notably used in fuel assembly designs for LFR, a distributed resistance model was applied to reveal its enhanced mixing effect on flow field. Code validation was performed by two steps. Firstly, our simulation results about a 7–pin wire-wrapped bundle were compared with that from high-fidelity large eddy simulation performed at Argonne National Laboratory. Ability of our code in local flow field prediction was well verified. Secondly, experimental data of 19-pin bundle with wire spacer presented by Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in 2016 were selected for the validation of STAR-PB. Its high reliability on heat transfer prediction of LBE-cooled wire-wrapped bundle was well proved. In the future, STAR-PB will support the study on the key issue about thermal-hydraulic analysis as well as the design of LFR.
