CORE AND SUB-CHANNEL EVALUATION OF A THERMAL SCWR

Abstract

A previous study demonstrated that the two-row fuel assembly has much more favorable neutron-physical and thermalhydraulic behavior than the conventional one-row fuel assemblies. Based on the newly developed two-row fuel assembly, an SCWR core is proposed and analyzed. The performance of the proposed core is investigated with 3-D coupled neutron-physical and thermal-hydraulic calculations. During the coupling procedure, the thermal-hydraulic behavior is analyzed using a sub-channel analysis code and the neutron-physical performance is computed with a 3-D diffusion code. This paper presents the main results achieved thus far related to the distribution of some neutronic and thermal-hydraulic parameters. It shows that with adjustment of the coolant and moderator mass flow in different assemblies, promising neutron-physical and thermal-hydraulic behavior of the SCWR core is achieved. A sensitivity study of the heat transfer correlation is also performed. Since the pin power in fuel assemblies can be non-uniform, a sub-channel analysis is necessary in order to investigate the detailed distribution of thermal-hydraulic parameters in the hottest fuel assembly. The sub-channel analysis is performed based on the bundle averaged parameters obtained with the core analysis. With the sub-channel analysis approach, more precise evaluation of the hot channel factor and maximum cladding surface temperature can be achieved. The difference in the results obtained with both the sub-channel analysis and the fuel assembly homogenized method confirms the importance of the sub-channel analysis.