Numerical simulation of annular dispersed flow in simplified subchannel of light water cooled fast reactor RBWR

吉田 啓之; 堀口 直樹; 小野 綾子; 古市 肇*; 上遠野 健一*

Proceedings of 29th International Conference on Nuclear Engineering (ICONE 29) (Internet), 7 Pages, 2022/08

About the boiling transition (BT) that determines the maximum thermal output of the BWR, it is considered that the spacers have significant effects on the occurrence of BT. And occurrence conditions of BT can be changed by devising the spacer shapes. In the light water cooled fast reactor: RBWR, thermal-hydraulics conditions are more severe than the current BWR. Then, the effect of the spacer on BT should be sufficiently utilized in the RBWR. In the thermal-hydraulics design for the current BWR, large-scale tests were carried out and used to evaluate BT conditions. The RBWR is still in the design stage, and there is room to be changed to many parameters. Then, it is not reasonable to determine the shape of the spacer by evaluation only for large-scale tests. On the other hand, by applying a two-phase CFD method with remarkable development in recent years, we can develop a model that can predict the effect of spacers mechanistically. This research used the detailed two-phase flow simulation code TPFIT developed by JAEA to simulate annular dispersed flow in RBWR subchannels. In the occurrence of BT, it is considered that the two-phase flow pattern is the annular dispersed flow, and we want to evaluate the effects of spacer shape on annular dispersed flow in RBWR subchannels. As the first step of this research, we performed numerical simulations of annular dispersed flow in the simplified subchannel of RBWR. We used a circular tube with the same hydraulic diameter as the RBWR subchannel to consider the basic effects of spacer on the annular dispersed flow. As a simulation parameter, we choose the existence of the spacer. The spacer used in the simulation has a simplified shape and the same blockage ratio as the RBWR. In this paper, we describe the result of numerical simulation. We evaluated droplets' size and velocity based on simulation results for the spacer's existence and non-existence cases.