The Very High Temperature Reactor (VHTR) system behavior should be
predicted during normal operating conditions and during transient conditions. To predict
the VHTR system behavior there is an urgent need for development, testing and
validation of design tools to demonstrate the feasibility of the design concepts and guide
the improvement of the plant components. One of the identified design issues for the
gas-cooled reactor is the thermal mixing of the coolant exiting the core into the outlet
plenum. Incomplete thermal mixing may give rise to thermal stresses in the downstream
components. This analysis was performed by coupling a RELAP5-3Dé VHTR model to
a Fluent outlet plenum model. The RELAP5 VHTR model outlet conditions provide the
inlet boundary conditions to the Fluent outlet plenum model. By coupling the two codes
in this manner, the important three-dimensional flow effects in the outlet plenum are
well modeled without having to model the entire reactor with a computationally
expensive code such as Fluent. The two codes were successfully coupled. The values of
pressure, mass flow rate and temperature across the coupled boundary showed only
slight differences. The coupling tool used in this analysis can be applied to many different cases requiring detailed three-dimensional modeling in a small portion of the
domain.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:tamu.edu/oai:repository.tamu.edu:1969.1/4160 |
| Date | 30 October 2006 |
| Creators | Anderson, Nolan Alan |
| Contributors | Hassan, Yassin A. |
| Publisher | Texas A&M University |
| Source Sets | Texas A and M University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Book, Thesis, Electronic Thesis, text |
| Format | 789199 bytes, electronic, application/pdf, born digital |
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