Progress in rod bundle CHF in the past 40 years

Abstract

Critical Heat Flux (CHF) prediction remains one of the most important tasks in thermal hydraulics of Light Water Reactors (LWR’s). During recent years, tremendous progress has been made in understanding and predicting rod bundle CHF. However, due to the unique features associated with rod bundle subchannel systems, including complex and compact anisotropic geometry, non-uniform axial/radial heating, open channel interactions, periodic (positional) mixing vane grids (MVG’s) mixing (Yang et al., 2014), and a broad range of operation conditions (Yang and Han et al., 2019), a precise prediction of CHF in rod bundles, entirely based on analytical methods without the support of any extensive experimental database, is still beyond the present modelling and computational capabilities. For Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR’s), CHF occurs at a relatively low coolant quality and is primarily driven by the Departure from Nucleate Boiling (DNB) type event, which can be triggered by liquid sublayer dryout, bubble crowding, homogeneous nucleation, or other mechanisms causing local starvation of liquid under subcooled flow boiling or low quality saturated boiling conditions, and the dryout event, which describes CHF under a high void situation when liquid film on the fuel surface dries out, usually happens in a high quality saturated annular flow. Boiling Water Reactors (BWR’s) operate at a relatively lower pressure and can reach much higher coolant qualities that correspond to annular two-phase flow conditions. This dominant CHF mechanism, dryout, is based on the gradual thinning and drying out of the liquid film.This paper provides an overview of the progress made in the experimental and analytical investigations of CHF in both PWR and BWR rod bundles during the past 40 years. A complete comprehensive concept map is developed to outline most of the key mechanistic CHF models covering the entire range of flow regimes. The limitation and the potential approaches for the application of mechanistic models to rod bundle CHF prediction are reviewed. This includes the recently proposed, rod bundle specific NHNM (Non-uniform heater Homogeneous Nucleation Model [Yang, 2017]). Various industrial empirical correlations are reviewed together with their corresponding subchannel codes and required rod bundle CHF experiments. The need for clear guidelines and standards for benchmarking new rod bundle CHF test facilities is discussed.Various approaches on investigating, understanding, modeling, and predicting the occurrence of rod bundle CHF are reviewed from mechanistic models, semi-empirical and empirical approaches to advanced CFD simulation. The achievements and limitations in those methods are discussed with suggestions for future advancement.