A study on modeling of boiling heat transfer in core debris bed of SFR

Abstract

In case of a hypothetical severe accident in a Sodium-cooled Fast Reactor (SFR), coolability of the debris bed in the post-accident phase plays a vital role in mitigating the accident and ensuring the structural integrity of the reactor vessel. Few numerical studies are reported in literature, in which the boiling heat transfer in debris bed is expressed as equivalent heat conduction using similarity law between heat conduction and two-phase heat transfer. However, these studies assumed steady state mass conservation for the boiling zone and neglected the gravity force. Hence, a detailed study has been carried out for various particle sizes and porosities of SFR debris to investigate the influence of above considerations. The effect of gravity on debris bed coolability is studied using steady state model of Lipinski, which showed that gravity has a non-negligible effect, for particle size of 0.3 mm and porosity of 0.5. However, the gravitation force was found to have a negligible effect in dryout heat flux estimation for the bottom cooled configuration. A transient numerical model is developed for simulating the boiling phenomena in debris beds and validated with the published experimental results. The assumption of steady state mass conservation is verified by carrying out transient analysis, which indicated early prediction of the dryout inception. For time dependent heat generation case, the unsteady mass conservation predicted higher DHF compared to constant heat generation.