Skip to main content
OSTI.GOVU.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information
U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information
 

Pressure Drop Correlation Improvement for the Near-Wall Region of Pebble-Bed Reactors

Journal Article · · Nuclear Technology
 [1];  [1];  [2];  [2];  [3];  [4];  [4];  [4];  [4]
  1. Pennsylvania State Univ., University Park, PA (United States)
  2. Idaho National Lab. (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
  3. Texas A & M Univ., College Station, TX (United States)
  4. Argonne National Lab. (ANL), Argonne, IL (United States)
+ Show Author Affiliations
Packed beds play an important role in several engineering fields, with their applications in nuclear energy being driven by the development of next-generation reactors utilizing pebble fuel. The random nature of a packed pebble bed creates a flow field that is complex and difficult to predict. Porous media models are an attractive option for modeling pebble-bed reactors (PBRs), as they provide intermediate fidelity results and are computationally efficient. Porous media models, however, rely on the use of correlations to estimate the effect of complicated flow features on the pressure drop and heat transfer in the system. Existing correlations were developed to predict the average behavior of the bed, but they are inaccurate in the near-wall region where the presence of the wall affects the pebble packing. This work aims to investigate the accuracy of a porous media model using the Kerntechnischer Ausschuss (KTA) correlation, the most common pressure drop correlation for PBRs compared to the high-fidelity large eddy simulation (LES). A bed of 1568 pebbles is investigated at Reynolds numbers from 625 to 10 000. The bed is divided into five concentric subdomains to compare the average velocity, friction losses, and form losses between the porous media and LES codes. The comparison between the LES simulation and the KTA correlation revealed that the KTA correlation largely underpredicts the form losses in the near-wall region, leading to an overprediction of the velocity near the wall by nearly 30%. An investigation of the form losses across the range of Reynolds numbers in the LES results provided additional insight into how the KTA correlation may be improved to better predict these spatial effects in a pebble bed. These data suggest that the form coefficient near the wall must be increased by 48% while decreasing the form coefficient of the inner bulk region of the bed by 15%. The implementation of these improvements to the KTA correlation in a porous media model produced a radial velocity profile that saw significantly improved agreement with the LES results.
Research Organization:
Idaho National Laboratory (INL), Idaho Falls, ID (United States)
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE Office of Nuclear Energy (NE)
Grant/Contract Number:
AC07-05ID14517
OSTI ID:
1967443
Report Number(s):
INL/JOU-23-71237-Rev000
Journal Information:
Nuclear Technology, Journal Name: Nuclear Technology Journal Issue: 1 Vol. 209; ISSN 0029-5450
Publisher:
Taylor & FrancisCopyright Statement
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

References (17)

Voidage variation in packed beds at small column to particle diameter ratio journal August 2003
Ein einfaches Modell zur Berechnung des Druckverlustes w�hrend des Werkzeugf�llvorganges und der eingefrorenen Orientierung beim Spritzgie�en amorpher Kunststoffe journal November 1978
A resistance model for flow through porous media journal June 2007
CFD modelling and experimental validation of pressure drop and flow profile in a novel structured catalytic reactor packing journal February 2001
CFD-based analysis of the wall effect on the pressure drop in packed beds with moderate tube/particle diameter ratios in the laminar flow regime journal December 2009
On numerical uncertainties in scale-resolving simulations of canonical wall turbulence journal September 2021
Various Bypass Flow Paths and Bypass Flow Ratios in HTR-PM journal January 2013
A robust and accurate outflow boundary condition for incompressible flow simulations on severely-truncated unbounded domains journal March 2014
Verification and validation of large eddy simulation with Nek5000 for cold leg mixing benchmark journal March 2020
NekRS, a GPU-accelerated spectral element Navier–Stokes solver journal December 2022
MOOSE: Enabling massively parallel multiphysics simulation journal January 2020
Pressure Drop in Packed Beds of Spheres journal August 1970
Wall Effect in Packed Columns journal April 1969
Toward Exascale: Overview of Large Eddy Simulations and Direct Numerical Simulations of Nuclear Reactor Flows with the Spectral Element Method in Nek5000 journal June 2020
Cardinal: A Lower-Length-Scale Multiphysics Simulator for Pebble-Bed Reactors journal January 2021
Pronghorn: A Multidimensional Coarse-Mesh Application for Advanced Reactor Thermal Hydraulics journal February 2021
Direct Numerical Simulation of the Flow Through a Randomly Packed Pebble Bed journal January 2020

Similar Records

An improved pressure drop correlation for modeling localized effects in a pebble bed reactor
Journal Article · Fri Dec 23 19:00:00 EST 2022 · Nuclear Engineering and Design · OSTI ID:2006631
Improving the modeling of near-wall interphase heat transfer in porous media models of Pebble Bed Reactors
Journal Article · Tue Jul 09 20:00:00 EDT 2024 · Nuclear Engineering and Design · OSTI ID:2583243
Pronghorn Porous Media Model Validation with Pressure Drop Measurements
Conference · Mon Mar 07 23:00:00 EST 2022 · OSTI ID:2322433

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
Pebble-bed reactor
large eddy simulation
porous media
pressure loss
wall-channel effect