Study on the deposition migration and heat transfer characteristics in the reactor core based on OpenFOAM

Abstract

Corrosion deposition in heat exchangers may lead to a reduction in heat transfer efficiency, and even can affect equipment operational safety. Traditional CFD deposition heat transfer analysis methods are limited by model size, making it difficult to obtain global, long-term deposition heat transfer characteristics for complex heat exchange equipment. In this paper, a corrosion product deposition prediction and heat transfer model based on sub-channel analysis is proposed. By integrating it into the nuclear reactor core thermal–hydraulic characteristics analysis code CorTAF, which is developed on the OpenFOAM platform, the corrosion deposition and heat transfer calculation for the entire reactor is achieved. A numerical simulation of the deposition and heat transfer of the AP1000 reactor core during a 300-day operation is conducted. The calculation results clearly show the distribution of corrosion products in the reactor core and the temperature changes of the fuel cladding with the deposition days: the maximum deposition thickness on the core cladding surface is 38.3 μm, and the highest temperature increase is 11.0 K. The deposition and cladding temperature rise distribution is not linear with operation time but is closely related to the core power distribution. The modeling method successfully obtains the corrosion deposition and heat transfer characteristics of the entire reactor core, and has potential implications for the prediction of corrosion deposition distribution and thermal effect calculations in other large-scale heat exchange equipment.