CFX simulation of high temperature thermal–chemical experiment: CS28-2

A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model of a post-blowdown fuel channel analysis for aged CANDU reactors with crept pressure tube has been developed, and validated against a high temperature thermal–chemical experiment: CS28-2. The CS28-2 experiment is one of three series of experiments to simulate the thermal–chemical behavior of a 28-element fuel channel at a high temperature and a low steam flow rate which may occur in severe accident conditions such as a LBLOCA (large break loss of coolant accident) of CANDU reactors. Pursuant to the objective of this study, the current study has focused on understanding the involved phenomena such as the thermal radiation and convection heat transfer, and the high temperature zirconium-steam reaction in a multi-ring geometry. Therefore, a zirconium-steam oxidation model based on a parabolic rate law was implemented into the CFX-10 code, which is a commercial CFD code offered from ANSYS Inc., and other heat transfer mechanisms in the 28-element fuel channel were modeled by the original CFX-10 heat transfer packages. To assess the capability of the CFX-10 code to model the thermal–chemical behavior of the 28-element fuel channel, the measured temperatures of the fuel element simulators (FES) of three fuel rings in the test bundle and the pressure tube, and the hydrogen production in the CS28-2 experiment were compared with the CFX-10 predictions. In spite of some discrepancy between the measurement data and CFX results, it was found that the CFX-10 prediction based on the Urbanic–Heidrick correlation of the zirconium-steam reaction as well as the Discrete Transfer Model for a radiation heat transfer among the FES of three rings and the pressure tube are quite accurate and sound even for the offset fuel cluster of an aged fuel channel.