A study of solute transport of radiolysis products in crud and its effects on crud growth on PWR fuel pin

Abstract

This research examines the concentration of radiolysis species (H2, O2, and H2O2) over the porous crud layer using a three dimensional time dependent solute transport model. A Monte Carlo random walk technique is adopted to simulate the transport behavior of the different species with various parametric studies of source term, crud thickness, and crud porosity. Particularly, this model employs a system of coupled mass transport and chemical interactions as the source term, which makes the problem non-linear. It is demonstrated that a negligible effect on radiolysis species concentrations change due to the consideration of source term. The crud thickness and porosity effect on the concentration distributions are notably observed. In general, higher concentration starts from the intersection of the heating surface with the chimney wall from the beginning and it reaches the equilibrium state within tens of seconds. The concentration profiles of the radiolysis species H2, O2, and H2O2 can be directly related to corrosion issues. The direct application of this study to nuclear engineering research is to aid in the design of reactors with higher performance without experiencing an Axial Offset Anomaly (AOA), an unexpected measured shift in axial power distribution from predicted values.