MyrrhaFoam: A CFD model for the study of the thermal hydraulic behavior of MYRRHA

Abstract

Numerical analysis of the thermohydraulic behavior of the innovative flexible fast spectrum research reactor, MYRRHA, under design by the Belgian Nuclear Research Center (SCK•CEN) is a very challenging task. The primary coolant of the reactor is Lead Bismuth Eutectic, LBE, which is an opaque heavy liquid metal with low Prandtl number. The simulation tool needs to involve many complex physical phenomena to be able to predict accurately the flow and thermal field in the pool type reactor.In the past few years, within the frame of a collaboration between SCK•CEN and the von Karman Institute, a new platform, MyrrhaFoam, was developed based on the open source simulation environment, OpenFOAM. The current tool can deal with incompressible buoyancy corrected steady/unsteady single phase flows. It takes into account conjugate heat transfer in the solid parts which is mandatory due to the expected high temperature gradients between the different parts of the reactor. The temperature dependent properties of LBE are also considered. MyrrhaFoam is supplemented with the most relevant thermal turbulence models for low Prandtl number liquids up to date.