Comparison of Experimental Power Reactor Hot Gas Chamber Geometry for Hot Gas Mixing Optimisation

Abstract

Experimental Power Reactor (Reaktor Daya Eksperimental/RDE) is BATAN’s proposed demonstration nuclear power reactor based on high temperature gas-cooled reactor (HTGR) design. As such, RDE faces an issue concerning severe temperature deviation in its hot coolant gas channel. Hot gas chamber, thus, is a necessary component to reduce coolant gas temperature deviation into acceptable homogenisation level. A preliminary simulation of hot gas mixing in a different hot gas chamber designs using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method is performed to study the optimum geometry for homogenising the coolant gas. Of the three designs simulated, the “slope” geometry is found to be performing best in homogenising the RDE hot coolant gas. Pressure drop of each design is also discussed.