Preliminary study of oxygen mass transfer in the primary circuit of lead cooled fast reactor

Abstract

This paper describes the development of a novel multi-scale and physics-chemical coupling system KMC-SUBTra-MC/TrioCFD based on the ICoCo interface and its application in a Lead-cooled Fast Reactor (LFR) named M2LFR-1000. This system is developed to integer a novel Thermal-Hydraulic code KMC-SUBtra-MC which is capable to simulate the oxygen/corrosion product mass transfer and oxidation/corrosion behaviour of the reactor core, and a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) code TrioCFD for Primary circuit except the core, enabling the solution to produce more realistic mass transfer simulation within the LFR. With the novel coupling system, a first preliminary understanding of the distribution of oxygen concentration in LFR can be obtained. The results show that when there is no pre-oxidized film on the surface of the fuel cladding, the system will face the risk of increased corrosion in the early stage of operation. An optimization method is proposed, which will be conducive to the operation of the oxygen control system.