| 1. |
- Bandaru, S V Ravikumar, et al.
(författare)
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Multi-nozzle spray cooling of a reactor pressure vessel steel plate for the application of ex-vessel cooling
- 2021
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Ingår i: Nuclear Engineering and Design. - : Elsevier BV. - 0029-5493 .- 1872-759X. ; 375
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Spray cooling is a versatile technology for various cooling applications involving high surface heat fluxes. Experimental facility was built to study heat transfer performance of an upward multi-nozzle array of water sprays impacting a surface of heated plate made of reactor vessel grade steel. The effect of inclination angles of the steel surface on the cooling performance was investigated to assess heat transfer in complex semispherical/ semielliptical geometry of large reactor lower head and to address possible application of spray cooling in severe accident management (SAM) of light water reactors (LWRs) based on In-vessel melt retention with external reactor vessel cooling (IVR-ERVC). Joule heating of SA302B steel foil of 0.15 mm thickness and surface area of 96 cm2 enabled prototypic heat fluxes to be evacuated during reactor accident. A 2×3 array of full jet narrow-coned pressure-swirl spray nozzles was used to reproduce multi-nozzle cooling. The tests were conducted as a series of consequent steady states realized at stepwise increasing power and surface heat fluxes up to the maximum values of 29 kW and 2.97 MW/m2 limited in the specific facility design. Seven surface inclinations, between 0o and 90o were tested and no significant variations in spray cooling performance with the inclination of the heated surface was found. The results indicated a promising prospect of using a multi-nozzle array system for cooling of large surface area of reactor lower head. Much higher heat fluxes can be safely extracted by spray cooling in comparison with the critical heat fluxes that appeared at RPV water pool cooling at natural convection. The maximum value of heat flux at direct spray impact zones and its drop-off slightly from the center to the periphery of the spray cone was detected in the tests. The water flow rate and liquid subcooling significantly influenced maximum steel surface temperature but had no noticeable effects on surface temperature uniformity. The spray-to-spray interaction had no observable effects on local surface temperatures, however, the colliding zones where four spray cones have visible effects on local surface temperatures due to poor liquid momentum. The results also showed that more uniform liquid film distribution could be obtained for some inclinations because of improved liquid drainage, which in turn leads to maintaining low surface temperatures.
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| 2. |
- Bandaru, S V Ravikumar, et al.
(författare)
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Upward-facing multi-nozzle spray cooling experiments for external cooling of reactor pressure vessels
- 2020
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Ingår i: International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. - : Elsevier BV. - 0017-9310 .- 1879-2189. ; 163
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Cooling by water spray is a well-known technology that can reach significantly higher Critical Heat Flux (CHF) compared to other cooling methods. For the light water reactor safety, the in-vessel retention (IVR) by external reactor vessel cooling (ERVC) is a comprehensive severe accident management strategy to arrest and confine the corium in the lower head of the reactor pressure vessel. Heat fluxes up to 1.5 MW/m2 have already been assumed attainable in low-power nuclear reactors while cooling required in high-power reactors is expected to reach 2.5 MW/m2. Instead of reactor lower head flooding and relying on cooling due to natural convection, a viable and more efficient alternative is to spray the external surface of the vessel. Given all the advantages of spray cooling reported in the literature, a lab-scale experimental facility was built to validate the efficiency of multi-nozzle spray cooling of a downward-facing heated surface inclined at different angles up to 90o. The facility employed a 2×3 matrix of spray nozzles to cool the FeCrAl alloy foil with an effectively heated surface area of 96 cm2 using water as the coolant. Heat loads and surface inclinations were varied parameters in the test matrix. The results show that no significant variations in spray cooling performance concerning the inclination of the heated surface. A surface heat flux of 2.5 MW/m2 was achieved at every inclination of the downward-facing surface. The results also indicate that more uniform liquid film distribution could be obtained for some inclinations, which in turn leads to maintaining low surface temperature. The obtained surface heat flux margin by spray cooling indicates that it is feasible to adopt IVR-ERVC strategy for a large power reactor.
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| 3. |
- Bian, Boshen
(författare)
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CFD Study of Molten Pool Convection in a Reactor Vessel during a Severe Accident
- 2023
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Doktorsavhandling (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- During severe accidents in nuclear reactors, the core and internal structures can melt down and relocate into the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) lower head (LH) forming there a stratified molten corium pool. The pool generally consists of superheated oxidic and metallic liquid layers imposing thermo-mechanical loads on the RPV wall. The in-vessel retention (IVR) strategy employs external cooling with water to maintain RPV integrity. Investigating the thermo-fluid behaviour of corium and predicting heat flux distribution on the vessel wall are crucial. The molten pool exhibits natural convection, which can typically consist of two stratified layers. There exists internally heated (IH) natural convection in the oxidic layer and Rayleigh-Bénard (RB) convection in the surface metallic layer.This study starts by illustrating the mathematical models that involve the numerical study of natural convection flow in molten corium. A verification work of the model has been done using a previous direct numerical simulation (DNS) study, and the results show good agreement. In addition, a scaling theory of the natural convection flow is demonstrated to facilitate the pre-estimation based on the Rayleigh number (Ra) and Prandtl number (Pr). After that, the numerical approaches involved in the numerical simulation of the corium are illustrated, especially focusing on the DNS method. A DNS mesh strategy is proposed in the form of a pipeline from the pre-estimation to the post-check. A scalability study of Nek5000 is performed on four different HPC clusters based on a DNS case of the IH molten convection in a hemispherical geometry with Ra=1.6×1011. The results show a super-liner speedup property of Nek5000 on each cluster within a certain range.Then, three numerical studies focusing on turbulent natural convection flow within both the oxidic and metallic layers of corium are demonstrated and discussed. Through these simulations, the thermos-fluid behaviour of the system is examined in detail, including flow configuration, temperature distribution, heat flux profiles on cooling boundaries, and turbulent quantities.1. A DNS investigation is performed on the IH molten pool convection within a hemispherical domain, employing a Rayleigh number of 1.6×1011 and a Prandtl number of 0.5. The results show a turbulent flow characterized by three distinct regions, consistent with the observation from the BALI experiments. Detailed information regarding turbulence, including turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), turbulent heat flux (THF), and temperature variance, is presented. Furthermore, the study offers comprehensive 3D heat flux distributions along the boundaries, showing heat flux fluctuations along the top boundary due to nearby turbulent eddies and a nonlinear increase in heat flux along the curved boundary from bottom to top.2. A numerical study investigates the effect of Prandtl number on the natural convection of an IH molten pool in a 3D semi-circular test section. Prandtl numbers of 3.11, 1.0, and 0.5 are considered, with a Ra= 6.54×1011. Smaller Prandtl numbers result in more vigorous turbulent motion and a thicker layer of intense turbulent mixing in the upper region. The descending flow extends further down the bottom, creating a stronger circulation at the bottom with smaller Pr. Additionally, smaller Pr leads to more thermal stripping structures and less stable stratification layers. Comparing heat fluxes on the top and curved walls reveals higher fluctuation frequency with smaller Pr for heat fluxes to the top boundary. However, the maximum heat fluxes to the side walls are lower with smaller Pr.3. A numerical study investigates the turbulent natural convection in a 3D fluid layer based on the BALI-Metal 8U experiment. Different methods, including DNS and three Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models, are employed. The results are compared with experimental data, and the performance of the RANS models is evaluated using DNS as a reference. DNS reproduces a two-distinct region flow structure observed in experiments, while the k-ω SST model exhibits similar flow patterns and TKE profiles. However, all simulations overpredict temperature compared to experimental data, with DNS providing the closest results. The DNS results also achieve better agreement with experimental data in terms of heat flux distribution and energy balance, specifically capturing the transient maximum heat flux on the lateral cooling wall. This transient behaviour plays a crucial role in accurately estimating the ‘focusing effect’.
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| 4. |
- Bian, Boshen, et al.
(författare)
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Direct numerical simulation of internally heated natural convection in a hemispherical geometry
- 2024
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Ingår i: International Journal of Heat and Mass Transfer. - : Elsevier BV. - 0017-9310 .- 1879-2189. ; 220
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Internally heated (IH) natural convection can be found in nature, industrial processes, or during a severe accident in a light water reactor. In this accident scenario, the nuclear reactor core and some internal structures can melt down and relocate to the lower head of the reactor pressure vessel (RPV) and interact with the remaining coolant. Subsequent re-heating and re-melting under decay and oxidation heat creates a transition from a debris bed to a molten pool. The molten pool, which can involve more than hundred tons of dangerously superheated oxidic and metallic liquids, imposes thermo-mechanical loads on the vessel wall that can lead to a thermal and/or structural failure of the vessel and subsequent release of radioactive materials to the reactor pit, and can possibly make its way to the environment. This study uses Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) to investigate homogeneous IH molten pool convection in a hemispherical domain using Nek5000, an open-source spectral element code. With a Rayleigh number of 1.6 × 1011, the highest reached through DNS in this confined hemispherical geometry, and a Prandtl number of 0.5, which corresponds to a prototypic corium, the study provides detailed information on the thermo-fluid behavior. The results show a turbulent flow with three distinct regions, consistent with the general flow observations from the BALI experiments. The study also presents detailed information on turbulence, such as turbulent kinetic energy (TKE), turbulent heat flux (THF), and temperature variance. Additionally, the study provides 3D heat flux distributions along the boundaries. The heat fluxes along the top boundary fluctuate due to the turbulent eddies in the vicinity, while along the curved boundary the heat fluxes increase nonlinearly from the bottom to the top.
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| 5. |
- Bian, Boshen, et al.
(författare)
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Direct numerical simulation of molten pool convection in a 3D semicircular slice at different Prandtl numbers
- 2022
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Ingår i: Nuclear Engineering and Design. - : Elsevier BV. - 0029-5493 .- 1872-759X. ; 393, s. 111772-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In this paper, a Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) of an internally heated (IH) natural convection in a 3D semicircular slice molten pool is conducted using Nek5000, a CFD solver with spatial discretization based on the spectral element method. The mesh requirements in the bulk and boundary layers are both fulfilled using known correlations. A calculation of a simplified internally heated box is first established with an excellent agreement to existing data. Next, simulation of the 3D semi-circular is performed showing qualitative agreement with the general flow observations from the BALI experiments. The velocity field shows that the flow domain is divided into three regions, i.e., intensive turbulent eddies in the upper domain, weak flow motion in the lower domain, and the descending flow along the curved boundary. Correspondingly, the temperature field in the upper domain is relatively homogenous, while that in the lower domain is characterized by stratified layers. Further, the heat flux distribution along the boundaries shows that the heat fluxes fluctuate along the top wall due to turbulent eddies, and the heat fluxes at the curved wall increase nonlinearly from the bottom to the top. Finally, the influence of Prandtl number indicates that smaller Prandtl number will lead to more turbulence eddies, deeper descending flow, and more even redistribution of heat thereby lowering the maximum heat flux to the curved walls.
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| 6. |
- Bian, Boshen, et al.
(författare)
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Scalability of Nek5000 on High-Performance Computing Clusters Toward Direct Numerical Simulation of Molten Pool Convection
- 2022
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Energy Research. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 2296-598X. ; 10
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In a postulated severe accident, a molten pool with decay heat can form in the lower head of a reactor pressure vessel, threatening the vessel’s structural integrity. Natural convection in molten pools with extremely high Rayleigh (Ra) number is not yet fully understood as accurate simulation of the intense turbulence remains an outstanding challenge. Various models have been implemented in many studies, such as RANS (Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes), LES (large-eddy simulation), and DNS (direct numerical simulation). DNS can provide the most accurate results but at the expense of large computational resources. As the significant development of the HPC (high-performance computing) technology emerges, DNS becomes a more feasible method in molten pool simulations. Nek5000 is an open-source code for the simulation of incompressible flows, which is based on a high-order SEM (spectral element method) discretization strategy. Nek5000 has been performed on many supercomputing clusters, and the parallel performance of benchmarks can be useful for the estimation of computation budgets. In this work, we conducted scalability tests of Nek5000 on four different HPC clusters, namely, JUWELS (Atos Bullsquana X1000), Hawk (HPE Apollo 9000), ARCHER2 (HPE Cray EX), and Beskow (Cray XC40). The reference case is a DNS of molten pool convection in a hemispherical configuration with Ra = 1011, where the computational domain consisted of 391 million grid points. The objectives are (i) to determine if there is strong scalability of Nek5000 for the specific problem on the currently available systems and (ii) to explore the feasibility of obtaining DNS data for much higher Ra. We found super-linear speed-up up to 65536 MPI-rank on Hawk and ARCHER2 systems and around 8000 MPI-rank on JUWELS and Beskow systems. We achieved the best performance with the Hawk system with reasonably good results up to 131072 MPI-rank, which is attributed to the hypercube technique on its interconnection. Given the current HPC technology, it is feasible to obtain DNS data for Ra = 1012, but for cases higher than this, significant improvement in hardware and software HPC technology is necessary.
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| 7. |
- Dovizio, Daniele, et al.
(författare)
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Validation of CFD RANS of an internally heated natural convection in a hemispherical geometry
- 2024
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Ingår i: Nuclear Engineering and Design. - : Elsevier Ltd. - 0029-5493 .- 1872-759X. ; 428
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- In the context of severe accidents, one mitigation strategy that has been shown to work for low-to-intermediate power reactors is the In-Vessel Melt Retention (IVMR) of molten corium. For this reason, several efforts have been put forward to make this strategy feasible for high power reactors. In particular, the aim of the European H2020 IVMR project was to evaluate and improve current modeling strategies, such as the use of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) codes for the prediction of flow and heat transfer in a homogeneous corium pool. Due to evident limitations, the validation was mainly performed against an available water-based experimental data, rather than a corium mixture. In order to overcome this limitation, complementary high fidelity numerical simulations, in the form of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), have been performed recently and are used in the current work as a reference for the validation purposes of the Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) approach. More specifically, RANS numerical simulations of a three-dimensional hemispherical configuration are performed using the STAR-CCM+ software. Consistent with the DNS approach, the Boussinesq assumption is used to characterize the internally heated (IH) natural convection problem. The flow conditions correspond to a Rayleigh number of 1.6⋅1011 and a Prandtl number of 0.5. Several turbulence models available in STAR-CCM+, which are generally used for buoyancy driven flows, are compared and evaluated against the DNS results, in terms of velocity, temperature, buoyancy production of the turbulent kinetic energy and heat flux. Reasonable results are obtained by the RANS models, especially in predicting the main qualitative features of the flow configuration, such as thermal stratification, fast descending flow on the curved walls and high turbulence at the top of the domain. The main divergence between RANS and DNS is observed in the bulk region, where all the RANS computations present strong recirculation, while an extended nearly stagnant zone is predicted by DNS calculations. A quantitative analysis is performed as well, highlighting the limitations of the RANS approaches, especially for the turbulent heat flux modeling, and the need for the development of more advanced models as potential future efforts.
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| 8. |
- Du, Yuxuan, et al.
(författare)
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Complementary Simulations to Determine Heat Transfer Coefficients and the Maximum Heat Flux in Multi-Nozzle Spray Cooling Experiments
- 2022
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Ingår i: International Conference on Nuclear Engineering, Proceedings, ICONE. - : ASME International.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- For Light Water Reactor (LWR) safety, spray cooling during severe accidents is one of the promising approaches to achieve In-Vessel Retention of corium by External Reactor Vessel Cooling (IVR-ERVC). To study the efficiency of multi-nozzle spray cooling (nozzles of 2×3 matrix) on a downward-facing FeCrAl heated surface, a lab-scale experimental facility was built. It should be emphasized, however, that a direct measurement of Heat Transfer Coefficient (HTC) on the sprayed side is challenging due to the strong interference of water flow and intrusiveness of standard instrumentation methods. In this paper, a 3D numerical model has been established with the same geometric and material parameters as the foil sample in a multi-nozzle upward spray cooling. Given the experimental temperature profiles on the sample's dry side measured by an IR camera, the complementary numerical simulations have revealed the HTCs and corresponding temperature profiles on the sprayed side, which enabled the prediction of the maximum heat fluxes (MHFs). The maximum heat fluxes for the given spray cooling conditions can reach up to 3.25 MWm2, which is more than adequate for what is required for a successful IVR-ERVC for high-power reactors. At the same time, the maximum temperature on the dry side at the highest input power is still much lower than the expected failure temperature of the sample material.
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| 9. |
- Hoseyni, Seyed Mohsen, et al.
(författare)
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Melt infiltration through porous debris at temperatures above Solidification : Validation of analytical model
- 2021
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Ingår i: Annals of Nuclear Energy. - : Elsevier BV. - 0306-4549 .- 1873-2100. ; 161, s. 108435-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This paper investigates the dynamics of melt infiltration through a preheated porous debris bed which is of importance to severe accident modeling in nuclear power plants. Proper understanding of the flow physics and affecting parameters is needed to define flow regime(s) according to combination of the driving forces, i.e. capillary and gravity. A model development and validation therefore should consider various effects and competing mechanisms. After a careful study of the governing equations and scaling rules, a known analytical model is validated against existing experimental data from REMCOD experiment. The predictions of this model are in good agreement with the experimental data. Furthermore, a global sensitivity analysis identifies the most influential parameters and reveals the need for further experiments with different range of affecting parameters. The results underline the importance of permeability as the most influential parameter.
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| 10. |
- Hoseyni, Seyed Mohsen, et al.
(författare)
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Metallic melt infiltration in preheated debris bed and the effect of solidification
- 2021
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Ingår i: Nuclear Engineering and Design. - : Elsevier BV. - 0029-5493 .- 1872-759X. ; 379, s. 111229-
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The re-melting of multi-component debris is important for both in-vessel and ex-vessel phases of severe accident progression in nuclear power plants. However, current knowledge is limited with respect to understanding the associated complex phenomena and their interactions. In this paper, the phenomenon of melt infiltration through a porous debris bed with and without solidification is examined by synthesizing the data obtained from ongoing experimental research (REMCOD facility). In this regard, results obtained from 12 experiments are analyzed. Eight tests were conducted for melt infiltration through debris at temperatures above solidification. At this condition, two flow regimes are identified for the melt flow inside the hot porous debris, which is initially dominated by capillary forces and hydrostatic head and then later by the gravity forces. In addition, 4 tests were performed for melt penetration into cold debris where melt infiltration is limited by solidification. It was found that the depth of penetration is correlated with the difference between "sensible heat of melt" and "the amount of heat required to heat the bed up to the melting point of specific melt composition."
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