Critical heat flux prediction for subcooled flow boiling in annulus

Liu, W.; Podowski, M. Z.*

Prediction of Critical Heat Flux (CHF) is important for nuclear reactor safety. However, the CHF prediction for subcooled flow boiling in complicated geometry such as fuel assembly still remains unsolved. As the first step for the CHF prediction in rod bundles, in this paper, we tried to predict the CHF in annulus, which is the most basic flow geometry simplified from a fuel bundle. We performed the CHF prediction by using liquid sublayer dryout model, combining with ANSYS CFX code to get the single phase velocity distribution inside the annulus. The results show that the CHF in annulus can be predicted in an accuracy of about 20%.