Numerical Simulation Of Temperature Field And Thermal Stress Of The Reactor Vessel In CEFR

Compared with traditional energy sources, nuclear energy is an efficient, clean featuresresource, and makes up the rapidly reduced chemical energy. Nuclear power developmentplays an important role in various countries increasingly. Fast reactors as the fourthgeneration of reactors can be widely used in the future, because it has the advantages ofproliferation, high thermal efficiency and safety, etc.There are many important components involved in reactor safety in the reactor vessel. Inorder to provide temperature loads for structure safety analysis of these large components andreactor vessel, we must have a clear understanding of the thermal-hydraulic of hot and coldsodium pools.Based on the status of fast reactor’s research at home and abroad and the characteristicsof China Experimental Fast Reactor, this paper makes a numerical simulation of the ChinaExperimental Fast Reactor’s vessel with the CFD software. The paper researches thetemperature fields of hot and cold sodium pools and porous medium by numerical simulation,gets the temperature fields and thermal stress fields of the reactor vessel’s wall, and calculatesthe fluid-solid interaction of CEFR’s simplified model. The main purpose of this paper is todo the systematic in-depth study of internal flow characteristics of CEFR reactor vessel andpromote the research to be applied in engineering practice in the further. Specific contents areas follows:(1) The Fluent software is applied to simulate the internal flow of China ExperimentalFast Reactor’s vessel and the porous media model is utilized to get the overall temperaturedistribution of the hot and cold sodium pools under the rated operating conditions. Thetemperature of the simulation is compared with the existing data and the feasibility of theoverall simulation is verified in the paper. The paper provides the basis for the temperaturefield analysis under the overall power-off conditions in the future.(2) According to the temperature distribution of reactor vessel, the paper uses theANSYS software to analyze the thermal stress of CEFR reactor vessel’s cooling systemcomprised by the main container, guard vessel, argon layer, and insulating layer. The papergets the stress distribution of the reactor vessel’wall under the rated operating conditions andthe overall power-off conditions, and provides the basis for structural optimization of the reactor vessel.(3) Applying the Workbench to simulate the fluid-structure interaction of the simplifiedmodel of CEFR, the paper completes the load applied, the temperature calculation and thethermal stress analysis. The paper researches the air flow in workshop of CEFR simply. Thisthesis improves the accuracy and reliability of numerical simulation greatly by changing thecalculation’s way of separating fluid and solid zones.According to the calculation and analysis, we get the conclusions as follows: there isrelatively intense temperature change in hot sodium pool, and the temperature remainsunchanged in cold sodium pool basically. The maximum thermal stress of reactor vessel is at-4.5m of the main container’s wall. Therefore, we need to strengthen the monitoring of stressin this region in the engineering applications.The work in this paper strongly associates with the practical application, and has highlypractical significance of project.