A Coupled Cfd Finite Element Analysis Methodology in a Bifurcation Pipe in a Nuclear Plant Heat Exchanger

The accurate calculation of temperature distribution in key parts of a nuclear plant plays a crucial role in maximising the power output and the plant efficiency, whilst ensuring safe operation. The need for making the most profitable use of the available sources of energy requires the full exploitation of plant operational capacity. Temperature dependent material properties mean that increasing the power output in a nuclear plant may reduce the life of the welds in the pipes of the heat exchanger (boiler), operating in very demanding conditions. Rolls-Royce plc was requested to come up with a suitable solution that shielded critical pipe weld locations, reducing local temperatures, so allowing a useful increase in power output from the plant. Part of the heat shield design process was a comprehensive thermal analysis of the installation. Traditionally fluid and solid simulations are conducted separately or using conjugate analysis. Standard methods rely on the application of boundary conditions to the wall surface, which are commonly based on empirical heat transfer coefficient correlations or approximate read across of the CFD results. An alternative approach using conjugate calculations can be adopted, but the computational cost and meshing difficulties in matching the fluid and solid grids makes this unaffordable in terms of analysis time. This paper presents the application of an improved method using a communication library (SC89) between the in-house finite element (FE) code SC03, and the commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code FLUENT. The method has been validated using test data from a Perspex model, where heat transfer coefficients were measured using a transient liquid crystal technique.