Development of a core coolant flow distribution calculation code for HTGRs

Inaba, Yoshitomo  ; Honda, Yuki; Nishihara, Tetsuo 

In order to ensure the thermal integrity of fuel in high temperature gas-cooled reactors (HTGRs), it is necessary that the maximum fuel temperature in the normal operation is to be lower than the thermal design target. In the core thermal-hydraulic design of block-type HTGRs, the maximum fuel temperature should be evaluated considering data such as thermal power, core geometry, power and neutron fluence distributions, and core coolant flow distribution. The core coolant flow distribution calculation code used in the design stage of High Temperature engineering Test Reactor (HTTR) presupposes to run on UNIX systems, and its operation and execution procedure are complicated and not user-friendly. Therefore, a new core coolant flow distribution calculation code with a user-friendly system such as simple and easy operations and execution procedures has been developed. In this paper, the outline of the new code is described and the simulation result of an out-of-pile test with one fuel column is shown as the first step of the code validation. The simulation results provide good agreement with the test one.