Development of Local Heat Transfer Models for the Safety Assessment of Prismatic Modular High Temperature Gas-Cooled Reactor Cores

This paper presents a model developed for determining fuel particle and fuel block temperatures of a prismatic core modular reactor during both normal operation and under fault conditions. The model is based on multi-scale modeling techniques and has been qualified by comparison with finite element simulations for both steady state and transient conditions. Further, a model for determining the effective conductivity of the block fuel elements — important for heat removal in loss of flow conditions — is presented and, again, qualified by comparison with finite element simulations. A numerical model for predicting conduction heat transfer both within and between block fuel elements has been developed which, when coupled with the above multi-scale model, allows simulations of whole cores to be carried out whilst retaining the ability to predict the temperatures of individual coolant channels and individual coated particles in the fuel if required. This ability to resolve heat transfer on length scales ranging from a few meters down to a few microns within the same model is very powerful and allows a complete assessment of the fuel and structural temperatures within a core to be made. More significantly, this level of resolution facilitates interactive coupling with neutronics models to enable the strong temperature/reactivity feedbacks, inherent in such cores, to be resolved correctly.