Computational Analysis of Fluid Flow in Pebble Bed Modular Reactor Using Different Turbulence Models

A steady state computational study was done to obtain the pressure drop estimation in different packed bed geometries, and describe the fluid flow characteristics for such complex structures. Two out of the three Bravais lattices were analyzed, namely, simple cubic (symmetric) and body centered cubic (staggered). STARCCM+ commercial CFD software from CD-ADAPCO was used to simulate the flow. To account for turbulence effects standard k-epsilon and realizable k-epsilon models were used. Various cases were analyzed with Modified Reynolds number ranging from 10,000 to 50,000. Each model showed different results as far as the velocity and flow structure is concerned. However, for each case the flow structure showed similar features such as vortex formation downstream and between pebbles due to complex flow separation [1]. The pressure drop obtained from each model was found to be in reasonable agreement with the existing data.