Investigation of applicability of subchannel analysis code ASFRE on thermal hydraulics analysis in fuel assembly with inner duct structure in sodium cooled fast reactor

Kikuchi, Norihiro  ; Imai, Yasutomo*; Yoshikawa, Ryuji  ; Doda, Norihiro  ; Tanaka, Masaaki  

In the design study of an advanced sodium-cooled fast reactor (Advanced-SFR) in JAEA, the use of a specific fuel assembly (FA) with an inner duct structure called FAIDUS has been investigated to enhance safety of Advanced-SFR. Due to the asymmetric layout of fuel rods by the inner duct, it is necessary to estimate the temperature distribution to confirm feasibility of FAIDUS. For the FAIDUS, confirmation of validity of the numerical results by a subchannel analysis code named ASFRE was not enough because the reference data on the thermal hydraulics in FAIDUS have not been obtained by the mock-up experiment, yet. Therefore, the code-to-code comparisons with numerical results of ASFRE and those of a CFD code named SPIRAL was conducted. The applicability of ASFRE was indicated through the confirmation of the consistency of mechanism of the specific temperature and velocity distributions appearing around the inner duct between the numerical results by ASFRE and those by SPIRAL.