CFD Turbulence Study of PWR Spacer-Grids in a Rod Bundle

Nuclear fuel bundles include spacers essentially for mechanical stability and to influence the flow dynamics and heat transfer phenomena along the fuel rods. This work presents the analysis of the turbulence effects of a split-type and swirl-type spacer-grid geometries on single phase in a PWR (pressurized water reactor) rod bundle. Various computational fluid dynamics (CFD) calculations have been performed and the results validated with the experiments of the OECD/NEA-KAERI rod bundle CFD blind benchmark exercise on turbulent mixing in a rod bundle with spacers at the MATiS-H facility. Simulation of turbulent phenomena downstream of the spacer-grid presents high complexity issues; a wide range of length scales are present in the domain increasing the difficulty of defining in detail the transient nature of turbulent flowwith ordinary turbulence models. This paper contains a complete description of the procedure to obtain a validated CFD model for the simulation of the spacer-grids. Calculations were performed with the commercial code ANSYS CFX using large eddy simulation (LES) turbulence model and the CFD modeling procedure validated by comparison with measurements to determine their suitability in the prediction of the turbulence phenomena.