| Issue |
EPJ Nuclear Sci. Technol.
Volume 6, 2020
Euratom Research and Training in 2019: the Awards collection
|
|
|---|---|---|
| Article Number | 6 | |
| Number of page(s) | 7 | |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1051/epjn/2019057 | |
| Published online | 07 February 2020 | |
https://doi.org/10.1051/epjn/2019057
Regular Article
Hydraulic and statistical study of metastable phenomena in PWR rod bundles
CEA Saclay, DEN/DANS/DM2S/STMF/LMSF, 91191 Gif-sur-Yvette, France
* e-mail: florian.muller99@gmail.com
Received:
30
October
2019
Accepted:
15
November
2019
Published online: 7 February 2020
The analysis of fuel rod bundle flows constitutes a key element of Pressurized-Water Reactors (PWR) safety studies. The present work aims at improving our understanding of nefarious reorganisation phenomena observed by numerous studies in the flow large-scale structures. 3D simulations allowed identifying two distinct reorganisations consisting in a sign change for either a transverse velocity in rod-to-rod gaps or for a subchannel vortex. A Taylor “frozen turbulence” hypothesis was adopted to model the evolution of large-scale 3D structures as transported-2D. A statistical method was applied to the 2D field to determine its thermodynamically stable states through an optimization problem. Similarities were obtained between the PWR coherent structures and the stable states in a simplified 2D geometry. Further, 2D simulations allowed identifying two possible flow bifurcations, each related to one of the reorganisations observed in 3D simulations, laying the foundations for a physical explanation of this phenomenon.
© F. Muller, published by EDP Sciences, 2020
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Current usage metrics show cumulative count of Article Views (full-text article views including HTML views, PDF and ePub downloads, according to the available data) and Abstracts Views on Vision4Press platform.
Data correspond to usage on the plateform after 2015. The current usage metrics is available 48-96 hours after online publication and is updated daily on week days.
Initial download of the metrics may take a while.