CFD INVESTIGATION OF EXPERIMENTAL DATA PROPOSED TO BE A VALIDATION DATA SET

Conference · Wed Jul 01 04:00:00 EDT 2009

OSTI ID:963761

Johnson, Richard W

The U. S. Department of Energy (DOE) is currently supporting the development of a next generation nuclear plant (NGNP). The NGNP is based on the very high temperature reactor (VHTR), which is a Gen. IV gas-cooled reactor concept that will use helium as the coolant. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations are to be employed to estimate the details of the flow and heat transfer in the lower plenum where the heated coolant empties before exiting the reactor vessel. While it is expected that CFD will be able to provide detailed information about the flow, it must be validated using experimental data. Detailed experimental data have been taken in the INL’s matched index of refraction (MIR) facility of a scaled model of a section of the prismatic VHTR lower plenum. The present article examines the data that were taken to determine the suitability of such data to be a validation data set for CFD calculations. CFD calculations were made to compare with the experimental data to explore potential issues and make recommendations regarding the MIR data.

• Research Organization: Idaho National Laboratory (INL)
• Sponsoring Organization: DOE - NE
• DOE Contract Number: AC07-99ID13727
• OSTI ID: 963761
• Report Number(s): INL/CON-09-15331
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

21 SPECIFIC NUCLEAR REACTORS AND ASSOCIATED PLANTS
CFD
Validation data
VHTR
COMPUTERIZED SIMULATION
COOLANTS
FLUID MECHANICS
GAS COOLED REACTORS
HEAT TRANSFER
HELIUM
NUCLEAR ENGINEERING
REACTOR VESSELS
RECOMMENDATIONS
REFRACTIVE INDEX
VALIDATION