Hydraulic performance evaluation of rod bundle with a concept spacer grid design

Conference · Fri Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2016

OSTI ID:22750125

Lu, Zhiwei; Liu, Tong ^[1]

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1. Nuclear Fuel Research and Development Center, China Nuclear Power Technology Research Institute, Shenzhen, 518031 (China)

In a pressurized water reactor the spacer grid has a great influence on the thermal-hydraulic and mechanical properties of the fuel assembly. In order to improve the overall performance of the fuel assembly, a new concept spacer grid design names CATF with 'non-bending' guide vane is proposed. The hydraulic performance of the CATF grid design is evaluated by using a commercially computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code, ANSYS CFX12.1, and the evaluation result is compared with ordinary spacer grid including bending guide vane. Three dimensional rod bundles including CATF spacer grid and ordinary spacer grid have been simulated. The analysis results show that local resistance coefficient of CATF spacer grid is smaller than that of ordinary spacer grid by about 29.7% because of the non-bending guide vanes. Furthermore, the cross flow strength between subchannels near the outer strap area, the swirl strength and cross flow strength in subchannels near the outer strap area in 1-10 times hydraulic diameter downstream the spacer grid area of the ordinary grid, are larger than that of CATF spacer grid. The two types of spacer grids appear to have the same mixing characteristics in inner-grid area. (authors)

• Research Organization: American Nuclear Society - ANS, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22750125
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
FUEL ELEMENT CLUSTERS
MECHANICAL PROPERTIES
PWR TYPE REACTORS
REACTOR DESIGN
SPACERS
THERMAL HYDRAULICS
THREE-DIMENSIONAL CALCULATIONS