A new method of fuel pebble temperature calculation based on neutronic and thermal coupling equivalent model

Abstract

As one of the six reactor types in the fourth-generation nuclear energy systems, the Very High Temperature Gas-cooled Reactor (VHTR) possesses inherent safety features. One VHTR fuel pebble contains tens of thousands of randomly distributed TRISO fuel particles, displaying a double heterogeneity characteristic. Current research models employ the homogenized method for fuel pebble temperature calculation, which neglected the neutronic and thermal (N/T) coupling effect and double heterogeneity characteristic. This study proposes a fuel pebble coupled equivalent method (PCEM) for temperature calculation. The method is based on the effective thermal conductivity obtained by the fine structure fuel pebble N/T coupling method. The new method is evaluated on steady-state and transient VHTR multi-scale neutronic and thermal hydraulic (N/TH) coupling calculation. The results show that the traditional temperature calculation method is conservative. Under steady-state conditions, the maximum degree of conservatism of the fuel pebble average temperature and peak temperature are 0.6 K and 14.2 K respectively. For the sudden drop in coolant flow rate transient condition, the average temperature and peak temperature of the fuel pebble calculated by PCEM are smaller than the values calculated by traditional method at the same time. Due to the influence of the fuel Doppler effect, the transient response of the traditional calculation method is slower.