Numerical Evaluation of Flow through a 5x5 Pwr Rod Bundle: Effect of the Vane Arrangement in a Spacer Grid

Spacer grids along the fuel assembly of Pressurized Water Reactors (PWR) maintain rod bundles arranged in a regular square configuration. The mixing vanes present in the spacer grids promote cross and swirl flow between and within the subchannels, enhancing the heat transfer performance in the grid vicinity, but also causing an adverse increase of the pressure drop in the rod bundle due the constriction on the coolant flow area. Therefore, the thermal hydraulic design of the grid must allow for both low pressure loss and high coolant mixing, which means it is important to optimize the design of the grid in relation to the mixing vane. More recently, Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) using three dimensional Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS) analysis has been used efficiently as an auxiliary tool in the development of spacer grids. The influence of some geometric characteristics of spacer grids on the flow through a rod bundle have been numerically evaluated and are still a subject of discussion. This work analyses the influence of the vanes arrangement in the spacer grid on the flow through a PWR 5 x 5 rod bundle segment. The Numerical simulations were performed with the commercial code CFX 11.0. To make the simulation possible with a limited computational capacity and acceptable mesh refinement, the computational domain was divided in 7 subdomains. The subdomains were simulated sequentially applying the outlet results of a previous subdomain as inlet condition for the next. In this study the k-ε turbulence model with scalable wall function was used. Five different vane arrangements were simulated at reactor level power and flow characteristics. The same grid and vane geometry were used in all simulations. The results of this study were divided in two parts. In the first part the presence of peripheral vanes on 5 x 5 rod bundle spacer grid tests were evaluated. The results showed that peripheral vanes should be avoided in experiments and simulations in order to obtain a closer to the real flow distribution at the center subchannels. In the second part the vane arrangement effects were assessed. Results showed that the grid pressure drop and secondary flow is only slightly influenced by the vane arrangement, however heat transfer and mixing downstream the grids are enhanced by vane arrangement that develop a cross flow behavior.