Discrete element modelling of pebble packing in pebble bed reactors

Abstract

It is important to understand the packing characteristics and behaviour of the randomly packed pebble bed to further analyse the reactor physical and thermal-hydraulic behaviour and to design a safe and economically feasible pebble bed reactor. The objective of this work was to establish methods to model and analyse the pebble packing in detail to provide useful tools and data for further analyses. Discrete element method (DEM) is a well acknowledged method for analysing granular materials, such as the fuel pebbles in a pebble bed reactor. In this work, a DEM computer code was written specifically for pebble bed analyses. Analysis methods were established to extract data at various spatial scales from the pebble beds resulting from the DEM simulations. A comparison with available experimental data was performed to validate the DEM implementation. To test the code implementation in full-scale reactor calculations, DEM packing simulations were done in annular geometry with 450,000 pebbles. Effects of the initial packing configuration, friction and restitution coefficients and pebble size distribution to the resulting pebble bed were investigated. The packing simulations revealed that from the investigated parameters the restitution coefficient had the largest effect on the resulting average packing density while other parameters had smaller effects. Detailed local packing density analysis of pebble beds with different average densities revealed local variations especially strong in the regions near the walls. The implemented DEM code can be used for further analyses of pebble beds and can be customised for particular needs. The results of the packing simulations are useful when determining suitable values to obtain a pebble bed with the desired packing density for subsequent analyses. It is recommended to consider the local packing density variations especially in further coolant flow and heat transfer analyses.