Validation of PRONGHORN with the SANA Experiments

Technical Report · Fri Dec 01 04:00:00 EST 2017

DOI:https://doi.org/10.2172/1466835· OSTI ID:1466835

Zou, Ling ^[1]; Novak, A. J. ^[1]; Martineau, R. C. ^[1]; Gougar, H. D. ^[1]

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1. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)

In this work, we have re-established the pronghorn’s capability to simulate heat and mass transfer in pebble beds based on porous medium assumption. Although more sophisticated physics models are available, we have limited ourselves to use the simpler Darcy flow model inherited from older versions of this code. Closure correlation, such as friction coefficients in pebble beds and fluid-to-pebble heat transfer coefficients, are reviewed, selected, and implemented in pronghorn code to support simulations of interest to nuclear reactor thermal hydraulics analysis. Numerical verification was performed in form of mesh convergence study using Method of Manufactured Solutions (MMS). For both spatial and temporal integration schemes, expected order of convergence were observed. Validation of this code was performed by comparing simulation results against experimental measurements of the SANA experiment. For helium cases at three power levels, simulations results of pebble temperatures agree with experiment measurements reasonably well. For nitrogen cases, because less accurate thermal-dynamics properties were used, relatively larger discrepancies between simulation results and experiment measurements were found. However, we anticipate that this will be improved when a more accurate nitrogen gas thermal-dynamics properties package is available.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-05ID14517
• OSTI ID: 1466835
• Report Number(s): INL/EXT--17-44085
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
SANA experiment
pronghorn
validation