Development and Processing of Thermal-Hydraulic Model for GFR 2400 Fast Reactor Design and NESTLE Coupled Transient Code

Abstract

The paper investigates the influence of the used thermal-hydraulic approximations on the coupled calculations of gas-cooled fast reactor design (hereby GFR 2400). The NESTLE code is used as coupled simulation tool and solves the multigroup neutron diffusion equation by the finite difference method that is internally coupled with a thermal-hydraulic subchannel code. The in-house developed tempin code and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code fluent (from ANSYS code system, Canonsburg, PA) are used to prepare the thermal-hydraulic data for the GFR 2400 calculations. The tempin code solves the steady-state heat balance equation with flowing coolant in triangular lattice cell together with temperature dependent thermal-hydraulic properties of the fuel, cladding, and coolant. Based on the calculated fuel bundle temperature distributions by the tempin code, the thermal-hydraulic material properties (approximations) suitable for the NESTLE coupled code are processed for the GFR 2400 design. The influence of the constant and radial heat generation term within the fuel pin is studied within the paper. The performance of the NESTLE code with thermal-hydraulic approximations processed by both (tempin and fluent) methods is compared with the findings of the GoFastR project. Moreover, both the thermal-hydraulic approximations were compared for one steady-state and one transient state, related to the rapid withdrawal of one control rod assembly from the core. Changes in thermal-hydraulic distributions are described and visualized in the paper.