Numerical Simulation of Liquid Sodium Convection Flowing Through Wire-Wrapped Subassembly

The demand of reliable and sustainable energy at affordable prices poses a formidable challenge to the whole world. The initiatives from various international organizations reserve an important role for liquid metal cooled reactor systems. The known difficulties in heat transfer experiments, especially with liquid metals, necessitate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) to solve these problems. In the present work, simulation on liquid sodium convective flow and heat transfer through channels with wire-wrapped rod bundles have been carried out, having similar geometric configuration to that of China Experiment Fast Reactor (CEFR). To this end, three dimensional conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy have been solved using commercial computational fluid dynamics code and some different turbulence models built-in CFD commercial code been evaluated. Making problem manageable single pitch of wire-spacer with periodic boundary condition are considered in the present study. Thermal hydraulic parameters, such as friction factor and Nusselt number, are obtained and compared with data from available experimental correlations for a wide range of Reynolds number to evaluate turbulence models built-in CFD code, which are valuable to further studies with more pitches and rod bundles in fast reactors.Copyright © 2012 by ASME