Design and dynamic modeling of a printed circuit heat exchanger for the next generation nuclear plant

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

OSTI ID:22977513

Chen, Minghui; Shi, Shanbin; Sun, Xiaodong; Christensen, Richard N. ^[1]; Skavdahl, Isaac; Utgikar, Vivek ^[2]; Sabharwall, Piyush ^[3]

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1. The Ohio State University, Scott Lab, 201 West 19th Avenue, Columbus, OH 43210 (United States)
2. University of Idaho, 875 Perimeter Drive MS 1021, Moscow, ID 83844 (United States)
3. Idaho National Laboratory, 2525 Fremont Avenue, Idaho Falls, ID 83402, (United States)

Printed circuit heat exchangers (PCHEs) are promising to be adopted in the design of the Next Generation Nuclear Plant (NGNP). A PCHE serves as an intermediate heat exchanger (IHX) to isolate the secondary loop from the reactor's primary system. The overall plant thermal efficiency relies on the PCHE performance and the reactor safety could be affected by the PCHE performance. It is therefore imperative to be able to accurately model PCHE's performance under various conditions. The aim of this study is to design an IHX-type PCHE for a reference NGNP design and conduct both steady-state and transient simulations for the designed PCHE. A countercurrent configuration and straight-channel geometry were adopted for the PCHE design and the classic log-mean temperature difference (LMTD) method was utilized to size the PCHE for the required thermal duty. A mathematical model was numerically solved to predict the steady-state and transient behavior of the PCHE. The steady-state temperature distributions of the fluids on the hot and cold sides and in the solid plates of the heat exchanger were initially obtained by dividing the PCHE into 1,000 segments along the flow direction, and were served as the initial condition for the transient simulations. A series of transient scenarios, including inlet temperature step changes, mass flow rate step changes, and inlet temperature step changes combined with mass flow step changes, were simulated and analyzed to examine the dynamic performance of the designed PCHE. The numerical results appear reasonable and it is evident that the dynamic model has the capability of predicting both steady-state and transient performance of the straight-channel PCHE. In addition, the numerical results could provide some insights for developing control strategies for PCHEs as IHXs in the NGNP. (authors)

• Research Organization: American Nuclear Society - ANS, Thermal Hydraulics Division, 555 North Kensington Avenue, La Grange Park, IL 60526 (United States)
• OSTI ID: 22977513
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

22 GENERAL STUDIES OF NUCLEAR REACTORS
97 MATHEMATICS AND COMPUTING
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
CONFIGURATION
CONTROL
FLOW RATE
HEAT EXCHANGERS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
NUCLEAR POWER PLANTS
PERFORMANCE
PRINTED CIRCUITS
REACTOR DESIGN
REACTOR SAFETY
SECONDARY COOLANT CIRCUITS
STEADY-STATE CONDITIONS
TEMPERATURE DISTRIBUTION
THERMAL EFFICIENCY
THERMAL HYDRAULICS
TRANSIENTS