CFD-Neutronic coupled calculation of a PWR fuel assembly considering pressure drop and turbulence produced by spacer grids

Abstract

[EN] A computational code system called Coupled Solver ANSYS CFX/PARCS (CSAP) based on coupling the 3D neutron diffusion code PARCS v2.7 and the ANSYS CFX 13.0 Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code has been developed as a tool for nuclear reactor systems simulations. This paper presents the coupling methodology between the CFD and the neutronic code. The methodology to simulate a 3D-neutronic problem coupled with 1D thermalhydraulics is already a mature technology, being part of the regular calculations performed to analyze different kinds of Reactivity Insertion Accidents (RIA) and asymmetric transients in Nuclear Power Plants, with state-of-the-art coupled codes like TRAC-B/NEM, RELAP5/PARCS, TRACE/PARCS, RELAP3D, RETRAN3D, etc. The transport of neutrons depends on several parameters, like fuel temperature, moderator temperature and density, boron concentration and fuel rod insertion. These data are calculated by the CFD code with high local resolution and used as input to the neutronic code to calculate a 3D nodal power distribution that will be returned and remapped to the CFD code control volumes (cells). Since two different nodalizations are used to discretize the same system, an averaging and interpolating procedure is needed to realize an effective data exchange. These procedures have been developed by means of the ANSYS CFX “User Fortran” interface; a library with several subroutines has been developed for calculation and synchronization purposes. The data exchange is realized by means of the Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) software package. In this contribution, steady-state and transient results of a quarter of PWR fuel assembly with cold water injection are presented and compared with obtained results from a RELAP5/PARCS v2.7 coupled calculation. A simplified model for the spacers has been included. A methodology has been introduced to take into account the pressure drop and the turbulence enhancement produced by the spacers.